AP
StyleGuard, powered by Lingofy, is a powerful yet easy-to-use
solution that integrates with Microsoft Word and Outlook providing automatic checking of
your documents and emails for AP style. Using defined structure and rules, AP StyleGuard helps ensure the
consistency of your writing style. It saves you the time of manually referring
to the AP Stylebook and offers recommendations on items you might not have
realized are covered by AP style.
Besides providing a quick searchable reference to related AP
style, StyleGuard interactively checks an extensive set of the AP Stylebook
rules for potential issues within documents and emails as well as
providing context sensitive information.
The following is a sample of the issues detected
by StyleGuard:
1. Capitalization
– First
Lady should be first lady; Professor Grant should be professor Grant
2. Abbreviation
– Bell Ave. should be Bell Avenue; January 12, 2013 should be Jan. 12, 2013
3. Compound
words – in as much as should
be inasmuch as; sweat
shirt should be sweatshirt
4. Hyphenation
– African
American should be African-American and Latin-American
should be Latin American
5. First
and second references – the definition for ABM (anti-ballistic missile) should
be defined somewhere in the article and the definition of AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) should be defined before any usage of the
abbreviation
6. Easily
confusable words – that versus which; accept versus except;
more than versus over
7. Easily
misspelled words – Master Degree should be master’s degree; MD’s
should be M.D.’s
8. Unnecessary
or redundant words – definitely should be avoided; on
preceeding a date could be omitted when its absence
would not lead to confusion; 9:00 PM this evening should be 9
p.m.
9. Word
preference – axe should be ax; cancelled should be canceled but cancelation should be cancellation
10. Word
with unintended meanings – admit should be acknowledge to avoid
mistaken implication of wrongdoing
11. Numeral
– two-year-old
should be 2-year-old; two years old should be 2
years old; four % should be 4
percent
12. Headline
– BOSTON, Mass. should be BOSTON;
Spokane, Wa. should be Spokane, Wash.
StyleGuard is designed to be easy to use with tight
integration with Microsoft Word and Outlook as plug-ins. It provides dynamic feedbacks to
the users without duplicating existing spelling and grammar checks that
Microsoft Word already provides. For example, Word accepts both cancelled
and canceled
as valid while StyleGuard advises using canceled to conform to AP style. On
the other hand, Word already auto-uppercases Europe so StyleGuard doesn’t have to duplicate that check.
StyleGuard also checks for punctuation errors. For example,
it checks:
1. Dates
with missing comma such as Dec. 23 2012
2. Missing commas
following i.e. and e.g.
3. Missing apostrophes
from terms such as childrens and bachelors
4. Misplaced commas
and periods outside ending quotation marks such as “Stop”, he said instead of “Stop,” he said and “Stop”…. instead of “Stop.”
…
5. Periods
followed by two or more spaces
We continue to refine and add rules to StyleGuard to improve
its error checking capability and provide relevant information for writers to
conform to AP style. With the assistant from StyleGuard, we hope it is easier
for writers to make the correct decisions and avoid unnecessary mistakes.