Week 7

"The Associated Press Stylebook" is full of so many interesting tidbits of information. You could turn to a random page every day and learn something new. Like just flipping through the pages I discovered that Knesset is the Israeli parliament or that every day is an adverb while everyday is an adjective. Also, we use a lot of brand names for many things, like Q-tips, Chapstick, Styrofoam and Rollerblades. My whole 20 years of life I never once thought that Rollerblades was a brand name, until I found out that the generic term is inline skates. This week going through the stylebook also taught me how much I don’t really know yet about grammar and editing. Taking the AP Style Quiz and editing the story really showed me how much of an eye you need when looking for mistakes. I read over the AP Style Story many times and I can assure you that I didn’t find mistakes until the third or fourth time reading through. It really made me happy though when I found those little mistakes hard to find.

My grammar mistakes I found this week are many misspellings and incorrect word-use I found in emails from salespeople at work. It is interesting to find that professionals themselves don’t send professional emails. The salesman wrote “Could you sent the school cards for Mash Vally and Moapa Vally?” And the “Mash” is supposed to be “Marsh.”

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