The Rules of Writing

You're a Ph.D. student who's one month away from the end of the semester. You have two extensive literature reviews and one journal article to write by the end of the term. You:

A.) decide to move to a new house the weekend before finals.
B.) spend your "free" time serving on a search committee for the university's undergraduate trustee.
C.) procrastinate by spending an hour talking about a new Associated Press writing guideline.
D.) all of the above.

Bet you can't guess which one I chose! Although the answer is D, I'd like to elaborate on C.

Yesterday, my husband was reading The Washington Post online and came across this brief piece by Rob Pegoraro: AP says write 'website' not 'Web site." Pegoraro was commenting on the Associated Press's decision to change 'Web site' to 'website.' Following the article were dozens of comments from readers about similar changes in language which my husband started reading to me.

Because hubby and I are both self-professed nerds, we spent close to an hour discussing inconsistencies in spelling for technological terms and the problem with citing online sources. I told him about the new DOI numbers being assigned to database sources. My husband hadn't seen these before, so I described them as being like a Social Security number for journal articles which now need to be cited according to the 6th edition of the APA Publication Manual.

Then we had a discussion about the proper spelling of email (or is it e-mail?). If one applies logic and previous rules for written English, I believe the spelling should be e'mail since you're essentially creating a contraction for electronic mail= e'mail. Where did that hyphen come from anyway? According to the Purdue Online Writing Lab, hyphens are used with compound words and prefixes. The letter e isn't a prefix or a word!

From there we drifted to a conversation about the United States as an abbreviation. Is it US or U.S.? I wasn't sure when I was editing a textbook last week, so I consulted the APA manual and discovered that U.S. is used for adjectives, such as U.S. Navy, but US is used when the abbreviation is a noun, as in "I live in the US."

What's confusing, and frustrating, though, is so-called rules for writing change depending on one's context. Until a few months ago, I was leaving two spaces after a period in MLA format and one in APA (now APA has changed to two periods). And how about all of those not-so-handy spelling rules where plurals are created by adding the letter s, unless the word ends in an o, in which case you add es, unless that word happends to be radio, which only needs the s.

Aggh! Now that I've successfully spent another hour of my life thinking about this article, it's time to get back to writing papers.