Watch Your Words

In print for over twenty years, Watch Your Words is a brief and accessible handbook for mastering best practices for journalistic writing, including tips from experts with experience across the journalistic spectrum. These best practices predate the digital age while resonating within it. The fifth edition updates its core content on language skills and Associated Press style, while continuing to offer language-skills self-tests with answer keys and sections on spelling and copy-editing symbols. The fifth edition also presents new content on inclusive storytelling and implicit bias. These prevalent themes, which have emerged in digital age journalism, reflect social mores behind how journalists are increasingly aware of, and acting on, the impacts of framing and language they use in their stories. Watch Your Words continues to be distinguished from other journalism reference works by its brevity. It provides accessible baseline instruction in punctuation, grammar, usage and AP style with clear-cut examples and self-quizzes. It presents sections on accuracy and fact-checking, brevity, clarity, and use of direct quotations with exercises, as well as an editing guide. Where digital grammar-fix and spell-check programs are useful, Watch Your Words provides a succinct yet deeper dive to help journalists and other media professionals master basic yet essential wordsmithing tools of their trades.