The Associated Press Stylebook (1980)

This book is a decade old, so it's about as stylish as thong revealing lowrise skinny jeans (my apologies if you're still wearing them). But it was an interesting flashback to what folks thought was newsworthy at that time, and how they thought it ought to be presented.

Just for fun, let's see if these selected items still seem important a decade later:

1) ax Not axe. (When will those Nazi's at AP get over their bias against that terminal e? 'Axe' has symmetry, which IMO is very stylish...And just for the record: Yes, I do own an axe, because our backup heat source is a wood stove, as opposed to a fireplace. Being an efficiency minded sort of gal, I like to split down the bigger pieces of wood.)

2) earthquakes (Almost 3 columns of yammering that clearly was not written by a geologist. My favorite line: "Theoretically, there is no upper limit to the scales." Sure there is. Take the Earth and shear it in two...as the hemispheres float off into space, any remaining geologists can argue over their cell phones about the exact magnitude of the resulting quake.)

3) Fahrenheit (Yep, we silly citizens of the USA are still resisting the transition to Celsius, the temperature scale of science and more civilized countries. For the math phobic reporter, AP included this helpful tutorial: "To convert to Celsius, subtract 32 from Fahrenheit figure, multiply by 5 and divide by 9, (77-32 = 45, times 5 = 225, divided by 9 = 25 degrees Celsius.)" AP also included a conversion table for looking up equivalent temperatures between -26F (-32C) and 108F (42C). I guess only the naughty reporters who get posted to Vostok, Antarctica or Death Valley, California are forced to use a calculator.)

4) AP Internet Guide (Nine pages of info that your elementary age child could write today, except your kid's version would be up to date.)

5) oil (Mostly discusses volume conversion factors and gives a table listing 15 different types of oil. I'm guessing that's so when a tanker runs aground near your coastline, you'll feel better knowing the exact tonnage and composition of the goo that's now covering all the animals on your favorite beach.)

6) Punctuation Guide (All these rules are cramping my style, man. Sure, I get that the rules are to minimize the distraction caused by readers noticing that I am not obeying the rules...am I the only one who sees the irony here?) ( )

Textbook, No Comment. ( )

This is the manual with the ring binder

Good for academic and news writing.

If you write journalism for publication, you gotta have this book and you gotta use it. Learn to like it because you can't live without it. End of story. ( )