Category: higher education

Stylebook gone wild

Those wild and crazy AP Stylebook editors are at it again, updating their staid collection of writing rules to reflect the fluid atmosphere of the Internet world.

AP StylebooksIn case you missed the news, the editors of the Associated Press Stylebook announced on Friday that the book was changing its use of “Web site” to “website.”

The news came to many of us via a modest @APStylebook tweet. Those who subscribe to the AP’s Online Stylebook received this more complete email notification:

Editor’s Note: A separate entry on website has been added to note a style change from Web site.

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website

A location on the World Wide Web that maintains one or more pages at a specific address. Also, webcam, webcast and webmaster. But as a short form and in terms with separate words, the Web, Web page and Web feed. See Web.

As you can see from the email announcement, the AP has made only a tiny departure from its conservative stance on Internet terms. It’s keeping some of the “big ‘W'” terms intact.

But judging from the reaction in the Twittersphere yesterday, you’d have thought the Vatican had just announced that it was allowing gays into the priesthood. AP Stylebook finally was a trending topic on Twitter, and coverage of the announcement by Mashable — that arbiter of all things relevant in the online world — was Mashable’s most retweeted link of the day on Friday. (Too bad for Mashable’s more pop culture-oriented retweetable topics, such as the Glee in 60 seconds video and the sudden Facebook popularity of South Park loser Kip Drordy.)

In the higher ed twittersphere, there was much jubilation over the announcement. But it also means some work ahead for those who have been following the AP’s book as though it were holy writ. It put folks like J.D. Ross, director of new media at Hamilton College, into update mode almost immediately: “Only 1,540 instances of ‘Web site’ on our Web… er, uh website… this will be fun!”

I’ve never considered myself or the campus I work for as rogues, but we’ve been using “website” since the early 2000s. In a January 2009 post about whether or not it made sense to capitalize Internet or revise it to internet with a little “i” (I doubt we’ll see the AP do anything as radical as lowercasing that term), I explained that our campus has “veered away from the AP rules for our own in-house style when it comes to Internet terms. We’ve looked to other sources for guidance — namely, Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age, by Constance Hale and Jessie Scanlon. As a result, we changed our style way back in the early 2000s to lowercase ‘web,’ combine (and lowercase) ‘website’ and dehyphenate ’email.'”

Here’s our rationale, from our in-house style guide:

Missouri S&T uses a combination of Wired and Associated Press styles when writing about the Internet. Because most of our audiences are Internet-savvy, we feel more comfortable embracing the less formal style of Wired as opposed to the conservative approach of the Associated Press Stylebook.

In some ways, the AP is a lot like the Vatican. It creates rules and issues pronouncements that many of the laity don’t take all that seriously anymore. Both institutions are struggling with their role in modernity.

But the AP differs from the Vatican in one important way: The AP sought input from the laity. Sally Jacobsen, deputy managing editor for projects at the AP and one of three Stylebook editors, explained that the editors “had invited readers and users of the Stylebook to offer us some suggestions for a new social media guide that we’re including in the 2010 Stylebook, and we got a very good response and a large number of people who favored ‘website’ as one word.” (Source: Some Cheer, Jeer AP Change from ‘Web site’ to ‘website’, by Mallary Jean Tenore at the Poynter Institute.)

Still, I’m amazed at how many people in higher education follow the AP Stylebook nearly to the letter. Even Mashable, in its much-tweeted report, refers to the AP Stylebook as “still the standard for all things grammar and punctuation in the news world” and confesses it has stuck with the AP’s “Web site” rule until only “several months ago.” I’m not sure exactly how long ago “several months” is, but it sounds as though our conservative little tech campus in the Midwest was well ahead of the curve in adopting the use of “website” some “several years ago.”

I think I’ll propose we start calling the Internet the “innerwebz.” Maybe it’s time for a LOLcats stylebook. O hai! There’s an idea!

Photo: “The old school rules, spiral bound” – by AllaboutGeorge on Flickr

The envelope, please: dealing with rejection

One of the newest online offerings from The New York Times is a blog of sorts in which six high school seniors talk about the college admissions process: the applying, the waiting, the angst, the rejection letters.

s-REJECTION-LETTER-largeOn The Choice: Demystifying College Admissions and Aid, you can follow along with six prospective college students as they share the drama (?) of waiting for those letters of admission or rejection.

It’s kind of like a reality show for blogosphere wonks.

Times education writer Jacques Steinberg acts as the site’s curator. As he explains in The Choice’s inaugural post, “Our primary goal is straightforward: to demystify and illuminate an American rite of passage that typically occurs behind closed doors, whether it’s the doors to the university admissions office, or those of the homes of the applicants themselves.”

While there is a little bit of a Real World feel to the six students’ posts, it does provide a look into how high school students (and their families) deal with rejection — a lesson better learned sooner than later. Some, like Anne Paik of L.A., puts on a brave front (“I will not let myself dissolve into a miserable puddle of self-pity,” she writes) but admits that “Underneath this cheerful bravado of sunshine and happy-go-lucky attitude, I’m really hurt and disappointed.”

I feel as if I’ve been rejected not just as a student, but also as a person, an individual with unique hopes and dreams. And that kind of personal rejection hurts much more than a rejection based purely on academic achievement. It’s a direct blow to my self-esteem, and causes me to question my own self-perception.

Oh, to be 18 again. (Actually, since I went to an open-admissions community college — which were called “junior” colleges back then — I can’t really relate to the whole rejection thing.)

Others, like Brian C. Bose, shrug off the disappointment with a “didn’t really want to go there anyway” attitude coupled with a fatalistic “the university is telling me something” outlook. Here’s an excerpt from his latest post:

N.Y.U. [which rejected Bose] provides fantastic training in the arts in the city that never sleeps. It’s New York for crying out loud; the “concrete jungle where dreams are made of” as Alicia Keyes sings it.

But the university is missing one key element: a campus, a true community. No school is perfect, and every school we apply to requires a compromise on at least one factor. So I applied knowing that N.Y.U. was missing out on that key aspect.

Besides, “I didn’t get accepted, so the universe decided that one for me.”

Nice to see today’s prospective students rely so heartily on reason and empiricism.

Whether it’s the universe or the blogosphere, something is apparently telling people to read these kids’ posts. Paik’s post, from April 4, has 140 comments, and Bose’s, just published today, has 19 so far.