Check Microsoft Templates for Style Errors

If you’re using standard Microsoft templates for Word documents, you should check the boilerplate for style errors.

For example, you would expect press release templates to follow AP style, but I happened to notice that the Press release (Professional design) boilerplate begins with “Portland, OR, September 23, 2004.” That’s very close to AP style but not quite right. AP prefers standard state abbreviations, unless you’re writing a full postal address.

In other words, the press release boilerplate should begin with “Portland, Ore., September 23, 2004,” in order to match AP style.

Racial Terms

Words, like the people who use them, have a complicated history. Nowhere is that more apparent than when we write and talk about race.

Imagine that you’re asked to review and offer editorial feedback on a set of 30 PowerPoint slides to be projected at a major influenza conference in the United States. The slides will be cycled on a giant screen as several hundred physicians and healthcare workers arrive, mingle, and prepare for the actual conference proceedings.

While reviewing the slides, you notice that quotations are used in the deck, quotations from a physician who worked among the sick and dying of Camp Devens, Massachusetts, during the influenza outbreak of 1918, the worst in American history and responsible for some 600,000 deaths. The Camp's doctor (let's call him Dr Roy) described the cyanosis at Camp Devens as so bad that it was

...hard to distinguish the coloured men from the white.

The quotations are poignant and serious, strategically chosen by the slide deck's author for their emotive effect. The quotations from Dr Roy's letter make perfectly clear the menace, the lethal threat, of influenza in 1918. But the important question that you, the slide deck's editor, should ask is this:

Is it appropriate to use the racial word coloured on slides being presented at a major international influenza meeting?

The racial term coloured (or colored) was originally adopted by emancipated slaves after the American Civil War, but it was superseded in the US in the 1960s by the term black. Some who would describe themselves today as black or African American find the word colored more than simply outdated: It is offensive.

Consider Henry Louis Gates Jr, who wrote in 1969,

My grandfather was colored, my father was a Negro, and I am black.

The word colored signals a particularly difficult past, one marked by the dehumanizing machinery of slavery and segregation. Not surprisingly, Merriam-Webster warns that colored is often offensive; it doesn’t even appear in the list of racial terms provided in the 15th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style,

...black people, blacks, people of color (usually lowercased when based loosely on color) Negro, Negroes

Nor does the 10th edition of the American Medical Association (AMA) Manual of Style make any provision for the word colored. AMA provides only two possibilities, black and African American (no hyphen), but also warns that African American may be the preferred term (though it should be allowed only for US citizens of African descent).

In its original 1918 context, the word colored as used by Dr Roy at Camp Devens was probably inoffensive, but the word's political and ideological baggage simply cannot be ignored by content developers here and now. Allowing the word colored in your slides, even in quotation, strikes this editor as dangerous.

Read up on the Camp Devens experience: in 10 minutes you'll have enough material to achieve the same profound effect without having to include words with complicated baggage. The slide deck's purpose and audience should guide your editorial judgment, and there's just no reason to risk alienating the audience with a racial qualifier.

UK Dates

Someone just asked how to format UK dates.

I follow Oxford:

Date: 30 October 2008

Day: Thursday, 30 October 2008

Range: 30–31 October 2008

Note that the range is expressed with an en dash rather than a hyphen.

Clutter: another example

The following sentence appears in a physician bio I've just seen:

His main interests have focused on the role of insulin and the insulin-like growth factors in normal physiology and disease states, including obesity, type 2 diabetes, and cancer.

Please note that a main interest is always already (ie, by definition) an area of focus. Thus, you wouldn't want to describe main interests as focusing on this or that: instead, main interests include.

His main interests include...

Regard or regards?

Thank you for your e-mail. In regards to your question, no, unfortunately that item is currently out of stock.

Is the word regard singular or plural in constructions like the one above?

Regard means attention, which is a noun that English speakers normally don’t count. Thus, attention paid to something—or attention given—will probably never take a final -s. You may pay close attention a number of times to a weaving car on the road in front of you, but you’re not paying attentions to a crazy driver. You’re being careful. You're paying attention. The words attention and regard are synonyms and never take a final -s.

I suspect people say (and write) with regards to and in regards to because they’re thinking of the plural construction used for greetings, as when you say,

Send Barbara my regards, will you?

And this is a perfectly legitimate exception to the no final -s rule. But in the strictest sense, this isn’t an exception: regards (meaning greetings) and regard (meaning attention) are two different words. The second one never takes a plural -s form.

So make a habit of using with regard to or in regard to (or simply concerning). It makes a difference.