Doesn’t Anyone Edit Anymore?

This was in my Facebook feed this morning:

npr copy

And, in case you are not of the Grammar Nazi persuasion, the use of the abbreviation “Ala.” to indicate the state of Alaska might not make you crazy, but if you’re like me, IT MAKES ME CRAZY.

Why? First and foremost, because it’s plain wrong. The postal abbreviation for Alabama is AL, the postal abbreviation for Alaska is AK. The standard AP abbreviation for Alabama is Ala., and there is no abbreviation for Alaska. (Mind you it gets crazy here because AP is doing away with state abbreviations and it’s just a stupid move on their part, but….)

Ala. has never, in any style guide that I know of, ever stood for anything but Alabama.

Shame on you, NPR, for letting this get out there. Double shame for letting it stand.

We all make mistakes, but you have a helluva lot bigger staff than I do and at least I try to fix things.

Advertisements

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s
https://markblackmon.wordpress.com/2015/06/06/doesnt-anyone-edit-anymore/
markblackmon.wordpress.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-26
51611
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:5UPZXVBPMENWCZ3KB7JITV6MWM53JJCY
<urn:uuid:10bc024c-2c6a-4f49-81d2-e03bb53ead15>
2017-06-24T10:27:44Z
192.0.78.13
text/html
sha1:ITPVXGT4M56IX74XNKFLPY42LK7M5AYD
<urn:uuid:ff3f34ec-d122-4970-bc3e-dd8b4e2caa5c>
https://markblackmon.wordpress.com/2015/06/06/doesnt-anyone-edit-anymore/
length
response
<urn:uuid:32452bc0-9d0c-49fd-bb29-e6a48cb4cf90>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-185-81-17.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-26
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for June 2017
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf