Timothy Johnson & Caelin Bragg
Lantern Staff and Advertising & Distribution Manager
This is not an issue of efficiency; this is about what is morally right and wrong. Imagine a system that is exorbitantly strict on many of its rules but is bewilderingly lazy on its other rules. In a nutshell, this is the AP writing style, required of any journalist.
Apparently, in the AP style, typing out the two zeros following a round number when writing a dollar figure is far beyond the reach of their weary fingers. They should probably start playing more piano to strengthen their fingers or perhaps enlist a more physically capable individual to go the extra mile and press that zero; not once, but twice, an incredible effort that will leave many AP style users scratching their heads over, wondering why they had never thought of that before. This lack of effort is not specific to the dollar figure though; additionally, it is true for typing out the time of day. The AP style does not include the typical semicolon, followed by two zeros.
Suffering through many years of not being as good as the MLA style, the AP style decided on a bold move to express its individuality so that people would remember they existed. The Oxford comma is no more. While typing out a simple series of words, the creators of the AP style discovered that typing out that final comma is a little too tedious for their aging fingers.
Additionally, what if we said that AP style, MLA style differ in another way as well? Wait, we’re sorry. Was that hard to understand? Because that was the other difference between the two. AP style, in its infinite wisdom, thought that typing “and” in a headline was too much for writers to handle, and that a single comma could fill its place instead. Well, it doesn’t. The comma is just another battle to fight against AP style and only provides a bad first impression, all to save literally three characters.
AP style is the “perfect attendance student who still fails the class” of writing styles. The difference between the AP and MLA styles is the epitome of the difference between a good idea and a good intention. However, that would be if we were operating under the assumption that any of the rules of the AP style had good intentions. Nothing that so relentlessly seeks to destroy happiness can contain good intentions. This is an injustice that we will not stand for anymore.
End the AP style.