Grappling with AP style

Most of you are doing well with the lead-writing assignments, but a lot of you had trouble with that first AP style exercise. The good news is that I usually drop your lowest AP style grade when I calculate final grades.

I know it takes a while to get good at spotting potential AP style errors and at figuring out how to use the AP Stylebook. So this week you can take another whack at it.

But maybe there’s another way to approach this. When I teach my “on ground” classes, I usually make AP style quizzes a team sport. I find it’s easier to learn AP style when you can put your heads together and learn from each other. I’m open to doing something like that here too … if we can figure out how to do it.

One way might be to use social media. For instance, I suspect many of you are on Facebook and could work together there if you “friended” each other. I could also set up a Twitter page for the class, if anyone is interested in using that venue. And I see that several of you have Yahoo email, so you could collaborate via a Yahoo group or by IMing.

If you’ve got a suggestion on good way to collaborate on AP style exercises, please add it as a comment to this blog post so others can see it too. Maybe if we put our heads together, we can come up with a good alternative.

Stalking the elusive AP style exercise

It’s become clear that my emails are not getting through to everyone. Some of you have contacted me, noting that you never received the first AP style exercise that I emailed a week ago…which explains why so few of you have posted that assignment on your blogs.

After a bit of noodling around, it’s become clear to me that there’s a glitch in my group email for this class. I’m getting an error message, but the source of the problem is unclear. I’ll try to sort that out this weekend…but in the meantime, I’ve uploaded the first two AP style exercises as PDFs and added links to them on the Class Schedule. Click on the link and the PDF will automatically download to your computer. Then you can highlight and copy the text of the exercise, open up your blog and paste it into a blog post, and edit it for AP style errors.

You’ll need Adobe Acrobat Reader to open these PDF files, but it’s available online for free. If you don’t already have it, you can download Adobe Acrobat Reader here.

Because of the glitch, you can have until 6 p.m. Sunday post the AP style assignments.