Copy Standards

You can have them at the start, or you can discover them at the end.

Tis the season for media guide proofreading. My experience is that while it may appear to be anal to set down style guidelines for what appear to be the most trivial details, it beats the heck out of reconciling the copy of three or four writers to avoid looking disjointed.

Sure, you can agree that AP is your standard, and even have an internal stylebook -- but here's a little example. When composing bios for athletes, how will that paragraph begin? Is that in your office's copy stylebooks or your website guidelines? Over time, I've used them all:

AT RIVER OAKS: or AT LA-MONROE: -- Breaking it down to reference each of an athlete's stops prior to your school.

IN HIGH SCHOOL: or HIGH SCHOOL: or HIGH SCHOOL CAREER: -- You don't notice that small difference until they all string together.

BEFORE ARKANSAS: or PRIOR TO ARKANSAS: -- Same issue, but really gets interesting when this mixes with high school, especially when you are also using this to refer to transfer students as a way to amalgamate a high school, a prep school and perhaps a JC or another four-year school.

And speaking of websites -- is that stinger before the paragraph starts in bold in the text version and do you plan on replicating that in on-line text? Hand coding that is tough, but can you access the CSS for your site to write a rule that makes copy that appears before a colon tag as bold?

Side hint -- to avoid that rule causing wide-spread random boldness, make it read for a return, followed by all caps, then a colon and immediately a return. That way, a colon in prose: won't auto bold (see, there's a space after it and likely not all-caps in front) and a time indication like 1:08.0 has no spaces, but is not going to immediately have a return after it.

They are all fine, and matters of style as to what you prefer as a writer/SID; just know that as an editor, you'll be really happy if you've set down details like that that fall between the cracks of AP and office stylebooks.