A Quiet Year for AP Stylebook Updates

Whew, with all that’s happened the past year with COVID-19 and other crises, this year’s AP Stylebook updates were, thankfully, relatively minor. Still, the updates, which were announced in April at the national conference of ACES: The Society for Editing (formerly known as the American Copy Editors Society, or ACES), are important for public relations pros to keep track of. I’ve put together a rundown of the most important of these changes here.  

In recent years, the announcement of the year’s major updates for the AP Stylebook has become something of a tradition at the ACES national conference. The updates are shared in a session led by the AP Stylebook editor, Paula Froke, and AP Stylebook editor, Colleen Newvine, and the session is regularly one of the biggest at the conference that always draws a jam-packed room.   

Some updates from recent years have been, at least to us copy editors, momentous. They include; taking the hyphen out of “e-mail”; allowing “over” to indicate quantitative relationships as well as spatial ones; and permitting “they” to refer to a singular subject; and, last year, capitalizing “black” when used in a racial, ethnic, or cultural sense.

This year, though, it’s no surprise there was no room full of people or audible group groans as the updates were announced. Instead, the in-person ACES conference was replaced by a two-day virtual conference, for the second year in a row.

Paula Froke, AP Stylebook editor, and Colleen Newvine, AP Stylebook product manager, led the online session to announce this year’s stylebook updates.

Below is a rundown of some this year’s biggest areas of updates for the stylebook. In addition, this link to a slide deck of many of the slides presented at the ACES conference offers further context on this year’s updates.

COVID-19
A new entry explains that “vaccine” and “vaccination” are often interchangeable. It notes that a vaccine is not a drug, a medicine, or a serum, and it should not be called an “anti-COVID-19” or “anti-coronavirus” vaccine. Similarly, “anti-vaxxer” should be avoided except in quotes, the stylebook says, especially because it is used mostly by people in favor of vaccinations.

Additionally, the stylebook now advises against using numbers given to variants of the current coronavirus, such as B.1.1.7 for the one first one identified in the U.K. The stylebook also recommends against using country labels like the “South African variant,” in accordance with the World Health Organization’s move from assigning geographic, individual or animal names to diseases to avoid stigmatization. Instead, the stylebook advises, use wording like “the variant first detected in South Africa.”

  Race and Ethnicity
In other updates, the stylebook continues to evolve its guidance for covering race and ethnicity.

Among some of the recent changes, “anti-Semitism” has been changed to “antisemitism.” AP Stylebook Editor Paula Froke explained that a decision by the Anti-Defamation League  to change its spelling as a big influence. More specifically, the entry notes that critics of the hyphenated and capitalized style suggested “it could give credence to the idea that Jews are a separate race,” and it also notes the racist motives behind calling Jews “Semites.”

In addition, Froke covered the stylebook’s updated guidance on how to use “Asian American” and related terms. These include not using a hyphen in this term, being specific when possible (“Chinese American” instead of “Asian American), and avoiding the use of “Asian” for “Asian American.”

Other new entries on race and ethnicity define “Pacific Islanders,” the Indigenous people of the Pacific Islands, including but not limited to Hawaii, Guam and Samoa. The stylebook, though, suggests avoiding the initialism “AAPI” for “Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders,” because it’s not yet familiar enough to people from outside those communities.

 Capitalization of “Black”
To recap a major update made last year, on the occasion of Juneteenth, on June 19, 2020, the AP Stylebook made the momentous announcement that its style is now to capitalize “Black” in a racial, ethnic, or cultural sense, conveying an essential and shared sense of history, identity, and community among people who identify as Black, including those in the African diaspora and within Africa.

The announcement followed a long discussion that the stylebook’s editors had been having among other editors, news leaders, and various external organizations, and the change also followed one that had recently been made by such news outlets as NBC News, The Los Angeles Times, The San Diego Union-Tribune, The Boston Globe, The Seattle Times, and the Gannett newspaper chain, including USA Today. The editors are continuing to discuss whether to capitalize the term “white.”

In parallel with the capitalization of “Black,” the AP Stylebook also began capitalizing “Indigenous” in reference to the original inhabitants of a place.

The changes for “Black” and “Indigenous,” which are consolidated in the stylebook’s race-related coverage section, align with the long-standing capitalization of other racial and ethnic identifiers, such as Latino, Asian American and Native American. More specifically, the use of the capitalized “Black” recognizes that language has evolved, along with the common understanding that, especially in the U.S., the term reflects a shared identity and culture rather than a skin color alone.

Adding to the change in capitalization of “Black” and “Indigenous,” Froke covered some other recent style changes to keep in mind that pertain to the use of “brown” and “people of color” in a racial sense.

Disabilities
Another update in this year’s stylebook is an entry on “ableism,” a form of discrimination pertaining to the belief that typical abilities, or those of people who aren’t disabled, are superior. The revised entry says, “Ableism is a concept similar to racism, sexism and ageism in that it includes stereotypes, generalizations and demeaning views and language.”

Froke explained that the disabilities entry is a work in progress, but for now its updated wording is warning against lightly using terms like “moronic,” “psychotic,” “demented,” “blind,” “falls on deaf ears,” and the like. Above all, she emphasized, writers should “use care and precision when writing about disabilities and people with disabilities, considering the impact of specific words and the preferences of the people you are writing about.”

Here are some highlights from the stylebook’s updates on disabilities.

Any questions or criticisms about this year’s AP Stylebook updates? Please leave me a comment below. I would love to know what you think.