Style & Grammar

When writing news, accuracy is the first concern. That means getting the facts right. But it means getting AP style and grammar right as well.

Here are some resources you can use to brush up on both.

AP Style Review

1. AP Style Review #1: Covers time, numerals, percentages, states, decades, centuries, money, addresses.
2. AP Style Review #2: Covers capitalization of titles, government, Congress, directions/regions, brand names, military, wars, academic departments, companies, roads, awards, Earth, political parties, holidays. Covers comma usage for ages, hometown, city/state and series.
3. AP Style Review #3: Covers abbreviations, addresses, who/whom, subject-pronoun agreement.
4. AP Style Review #4: Covers numerals, including measurements, dimensions, number, odds, ratios, scores, temperatures, weights. Covers commas in quotations.

Grammar

• Common Grammar Errors: Covers sentence structure, subject-verb agreement, plurals and possessives, that and which, who and whom,  parallel construction and some common spelling errors. Download as a PDF.
•  Paramedic Method. This method helps reduce word count by eliminating unnecessary words. It also helps you activate your sentences by eliminating passive voice and redundancies.
• Get help with a variety of common writing issues from the Purdue Online Writing Lab:
  • active and passive voice
  • apostrophe
  • commas
  • dangling modifiers
  • independent and dependent clauses
  • prepositions (for time, place and introducing objects)
  • pronouns
  • punctuation
  • quotation marks
  • relative pronouns (that, who, whom, whose, which, where, when, and why)
  • sentence clarity
  • verb tenses
  • sentence fragments
  • spelling
• Practice what you have learned using these online and printable exercises from the Purdue Writing Lab.