Watch Your Words

Journalistic Writing and Editing for the Digital Age

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Watch Your Words cover

Watch Your Words

Journalistic Writing and Editing for the Digital Age

  • Textbook
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Description

In print for twenty years, Watch Your Words is a brief and accessible handbook for mastering best practices of journalistic writing. This new, fifth edition includes tips from experts with experience across the journalistic spectrum on best practices that predate the digital age while resonating within it.
The fifth edition also includes new content on implicit bias and inclusive storytelling—prevalent themes in digital age journalism that reflect how journalists are increasingly aware of, and acting on, social impacts of framing and language that they use in their stories.
Watch Your Words continues to be distinguished from other journalism reference works by its brevity. It provides accessible baseline instruction in its core content of punctuation, grammar, usage and updated entries on Associated Press style through clear-cut examples, self-quizzes, and answer keys. It also presents sections on accuracy and fact-checking, brevity, clarity, and use of direct quotations, with exercises, as well as an editing guide. Where digital grammar-fix and spell-check programs are useful, Watch Your Words provides a succinct yet deeper dive to help journalists and other media professionals master basic yet essential wordsmithing tools of their trades.

Table of Contents

Introduction: On Disruption and Continuity

Best Practices for Journalistic Writing

Implicit Bias and Inclusive Storytelling

Punctuation
-Rules and Guidelines
-Conjunction Junction: Comma Rules for and, but and or
-Nonessential vs. Essential: That vs. Which
-Punctuation Self-Test

Grammar
-Basic Terms and Concepts
-Grammar Terms and Concepts Exercise
-Mapping Who vs. Whom
-Making the Right Choice
-Practice Sentences: Who vs. Whom
-Other Rules and Guidelines
-Grammar Self-Tests

Usage
-Rules and Guidelines
-Usage Self-Test

RECAP: Comprehensive Self-Test

AP Style
-Evolutionary Updates and Evergreen Mainstays
-AP Style Study Guides & Self-Tests

Supplementary Self-Tests
-Punctuation/AP Style Test
-Grammar/AP Style Test
-Usage/AP Style Test
-Final Language-Skills Test
-Quality-Control Guide to Writing and Editing
-Accuracy and Fact-Checking
-Fact-Checking Exercise
-Brevity and Tightening
-Tightening Exercise
-Clarity
-Clarity Exercise
-Quotations and Attribution
-Quotations and Attribution Exercise
-Basic Editing Principles

Spelling
-Homonyms and Sound-Alikes Exercise
-Spelltraps

Copy-Editing Symbols
-Copy-Editing Symbols Self-Test
-Basic Symbolism

Answer Keys
-Punctuation Self-Test
-Grammar Terms and Concepts Exercise
-Grammar Self-Test I
-Grammar Self-Test II
-Usage Self-Test
-RECAP: Comprehensive Self-Test
-AP Style Self-Test I
-AP Style Self-Test II
-AP Style Self-Test III
-Punctuation/AP Style Test
-Grammar/AP Style Test
-Usage/AP Style Test
-Final Language-Skills Test
-Fact-Checking Exercise
-Tightening Exercise
-Clarity Exercise
-Quotations and Attribution Exercise
-Homonyms and Sound-Alikes Exercise
-Copy-Editing Symbols Self-Test

Product details

Published Nov 16 2023
Format Hardback
Edition 5th
Extent 122
ISBN 9781538176351
Imprint Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Illustrations 3 b/w illustrations; 36 textboxes
Dimensions 261 x 183 mm
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

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