At the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund Center for Editing Excellence at the University of Texas at Austin, a two-week long boot camp for college students selected to be interns at papers such as The Dallas Morning News, The Denver Post, the Houston Chronicle, the San Antonio Express-News and the Colorado Springs Gazette, all of the instructors focus on critical elements of copy editing. Instructors focus on reducing wordiness, checking ac-curacy, following rules of style and improving the quality of every single story, caption and headline in the publication.

Griff Singer, the director of the center, says, “a good newspaper thinks before it publishes.” And he developed a list of what makes a good publication.

• Accuracy
• Fairness
• It’s interesting
• Assumes reader intelligence
• Audits the community
• Loves and respects the community
• It’s diverse in content and approach to the news
• Independent
• Shows energy, hustle, doggedness, wit
• Accepts criticism gracefully
• Has class and good taste
• Can laugh at itself and be outrageous for good cause
• Uses restraint and care

The Local Angle

To help N.C. State University Student Media improve, we’ve developed this stylebook to assist students in improving their consistency and accuracy.

This stylebook is NOT

• A replacement for The Associated Press Stylebook. Some entries in this local style guide are exceptions to AP style.
• A replacement for a good dictionary.
• An excuse to be a lazy reporter.

It is one more resource in the arsenal for reporters and editors. Use it wisely.

Quiz Time

At the back are a number of copy-editing quizzes. When you think you’ve mastered the style, take these quizzes. They contain material previously published in N.C. State publications. While the errors may seem obvious to you, they escaped the watchful eye of a reporter, a copy-editor, a section editor and a top editor before they made it into the publication. Your job is to make sure these errors never happen again.

At the top of the list for what makes a good publication is ACCURACY. The readers notice when we’re inaccurate, whether it’s inaccuracy in spelling or inconsistency in style. Then they wonder what other mistakes we’ve made that they haven’t caught. Don’t give them a reason to question our accuracy.

Stylebook Editors

1997 – Stephanie Bullock
Technician copy desk cheif

2003 – Amy Bissinger
Technician copy desk cheif

2005 – Tyler Dukes
Technician news editor

Bradley Wilson
Student media advisor