Watch Your Words

Book excerpt: Journalists — even those working simultaneously in print, on air and on the Web — trade in words. Using language well across platforms is a vital skill; the cleaner and clearer the text, the more effective the result. Watch Your Words, now in its fourth edition, is a brief and accessible handbook for mastering baseline knowledge of punctuation, grammar, usage and Associated Press style. This new edition features a new quality-control guide to writing and editing. The guide covers accuracy and fact-checking; brevity and tightening; clarity; use of quotes and attribution; and basic editing principles. The new edition also incorporates current AP style and continues to offer language-skills self-tests with answer keys, as well as sections on spelling and copy-editing symbols. It is an excellent resource for use in both the classroom and the newsroom.