Copyright Goodheart-Willcox Co., Inc. Chapter Two News Values and Story Ideas 57 Chapter T Chapter Twoow Journalism Style Look It Up! Look It Up! Do you need hyphens in your review of a cloak and dagger movie? Do you call the female teacher who heads the English department the chairman? Chairwoman? If your Winter Formal theme is “Paris at Night,” what do you capitalize in the city of light? If your debate team will compete at Fordham University, how many capitals do you need in new york city? If the ski team competed in the Catskills, how many capitals do you need in new york state? Journalists don’t guess, yet very few are walking databases of this kind of information. They look up what they are not absolutely sure of. Student journalists need to do the same thing—look it up. Where do you look it up? That depends on your publication or broadcast’s media and style. The most-used stylebook in journalism is The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law, available in print and online. If you publish a news magazine, your staff leadership may have adopted The Chicago Manual of Style. If you publish online, you may use The Yahoo! Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World. If you are mainly a broadcast staff, you may use Broadcast News and Writing Stylebook. Other publications base their style on other resources that fit with their school’s mission. In addition to your stylebook, you should have copies of Webster’s New World College Dictionary. All stylebooks and dictionaries should be the most recent edition possible. Your publication should also have a stylebook that overrides the official, printed stylebook your staff adopted. For instance, the AP Stylebook allows the use of chairwoman and chairman, but your staff may have decided that your publication will use the gender-free chair, as in “The competition will be organized by the English department chair, Marlys Nelson.” A publication’s stylebook addresses issues that arise often in school life and carves out exceptions to the adopted stylebook. In the next column is a short quiz to help you assess your knowledge of the correct usage, help you become familiar with AP style resources, and develop the “look it up” habit. Journalism Style Quiz Journalism Style Quiz Directions: On your own paper, number 1 through 28. Next to each number on your paper write any needed corrections for the line below with the corresponding number. If no corrections are needed, write “correct” next to the number. 1 Four fighting Irish forensics team 2 members, Seniors David Cassel and 3 Hector Martinez and Juniors Aisha 4 Chopra and Karen Carlyle, will 5 advance to the US Speech and 6 Debate Tournament in Dallas May 4—5. 7 Cassel, Martinez, Chopra, and 8 Carlyle were propeled to the national 9 competition when the fourensics team 10 brought home 5 gold medals from the 11 New York State forensic league state 12 championship tournament in Mineola, 13 NY, Apr. 12. 14 Sophamore Kanye Jackson’s gold 15 added to the total 16 Senior David Cassel, a four year 17 veteran of John F Kennedy High 18 School forensics competitions 19 gathered a gold medal for his ten 20 minute original speach on the 21 importance of intrapersonal 22 communication in a society obsessed 23 with technology. 24 Senior, Hector Martinez captured 25 a gold metal with his policy debate 26 titled The Importance of Space 27 Exploration in an Age of National 28 Debt.