Friday, March 18, 2011

@APStylebook says e-mail is now email!

If you don't follow @APStylebook on Twitter yet, you should. The handle is the official Twitter of the AP Stylebook, aka - the PR and journalism bible.

I was devastated about a year ago when AP style changed "Web site" to "website." It was one of those words that I had always thought was strange, but after two years of taking public relations classes "Web site" had finally felt comfortable.

Almost one year later, that painful feeling of having to relearn the spelling of vocabulary has returned. @APStylebook announced that as of today (Friday, March 18) "e-mail" is now "email" with no hyphen.

I have already written about ten e-mails (sorry, "emails") in the last few hours with "e-mail" referenced somewhere in the body, and edited a colleague's document at work to correct his use of "email." Looks like it's me that needs to be corrected now!

Although changes like this can be frustrating to keep up with, we are trained as PR people to constantly adapt to new situations and keep going. Even though it will take some time to get used to, there really was no modern reason for website to be two words or email to have a hyphen. People who don't follow AP style have already been using "website" and "email" for years, now we have to catch up!

What are your thoughts about the change?

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