A brilliant impostor

If you already follow APStylebook on Twitter, now you can add the hilarious impostor, FakeAPStylebook.

Background for those who are lost: The Associated Press is a news organization that I'm sure you have heard of. If you haven't, open your local newspaper and check out the bylines on stories and credit lines on photos. Most likely, some (or a lot) of those are AP. The AP Stylebook is the organization's style guide, which has become "the journalist's bible," according to its website. What this means is that the majority of newspapers use the AP Stylebook as the basis for their own style guides. Why do I care? As a copy editor, I reference this book a lot.

Still confused about what's in there? Let's say a story arrives with a reference to "band aids." A quick glance at the stylebook would tell you Band-Aid is a trademark, so if you want to use the word, you should capitalize, spell and punctuate it that way (otherwise you risk the company's anger, or lawyers). That's one specific example, but the book includes explanations of companies (Ford Motor Co.), international groups (al-Qaida) and commonly misused words (affect, effect). It also contains standardized ways of writing lots of things (numbers, dates, congressional titles, etc.) so that they are consistent throughout each story and the entire newspaper every day.

Now that you have a small clue what I'm referring to, APStylebook tweets about new terms that come up and changes to the stylebook. It also answers questions about style from other Twitterers. An example tweet: 's for singular common nouns ending s unless next word starts s #apstyle RT @Kubalski possessive of "business" (the business's purpose)?

FakeAPStylebook posts humorous tweets such as: Boring literary works can be improved by adding -izzle to their titles: Ulyssizzle, Moby Dizzle, Hizzle of Darknizzle.