Report From the 2019 ACES Conference

The New Yorker has published a report from the 2019 American Copy Editors Society Conference. I think I would have enjoyed being there.

The conference offers dozens of sessions, on everything from gender consciousness to “Bad English,” in which James Harbeck, a freelance editor based in Toronto, showed how “Fifty Shades of Grey” had been put through one of the sites competing for your grammar dollars, and demonstrated that eliminating redundancy does not improve pornography. But the centerpiece of the weekend is the session at which the A.P. announces changes to its annual style guide. It was standing room only in Narragansett A as Paula Froke, the lead editor of the A.P. Stylebook, ran through her slides. There were guidelines on race—whether a subject is black or white need not be reported unless it’s pertinent to the story—and updates on recreational marijuana (pot or cannabis on second reference; employees at dispensaries are budtenders). A cheer went up when Froke announced that “split forms” are acceptable—most copy editors have long since stopped worrying about the split infinitive, but now we are good “to boldly go” where the English language has been going for centuries. Another cheer went up at the news that “data” takes a singular verb and pronoun (except in academic and scientific papers). A slide that said “Percent, Percentage” was greeted with a roar. From now on, the A.P. will use the percent sign after a numeral instead of writing out “percent” or “percentage.” Although 99.5% of those present approved, no publication is obligated to follow A.P. style. The New Yorker still spells out “per cent” and even makes it two words.

Exciting stuff. Go forth and update your style guides.