At The Speaker, we use a set of writing rules called AP Style. This is your first piece of news writing, so don’t worry about getting AP style down perfect. However, here are five rules that you should know right away:
– There are no double-spaces. Between sentences, use a single-space.
– Single spaces between paragraphs, too.
– Quotations go outside of punctuation.
“No man is an island,” the poet said. The poet said, “No man is an island.”
(Quotes within quotes: “It sounded like she said, ‘This could be news,’ but I wasn’t sure,” Donne concluded.)
– Spell out numbers below 10 and use figures for numbers 10 and above (zero, one, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 203, 2,004, 20,005, 200,006). Numbers at the beginning of a sentence are spelled out.
Twenty plus five is 25.
– “Percent” is written “percent,” not “%.”
Why are these style rules important at first, while others aren’t?
Going through a whole article and taking out every double-space, replacing every single-quote mark with a double-quote mark, putting every quote outside of punctuation, and changing every “%” to “percent” takes a lot of time and is very tedious.
Also if English is not your first language, there is one rule we want to to use: CLICK HERE
by The Speaker