TOWARD: 31 days of 5-minute free writes

Tell ya what — it’s a good thing this prompt is “toward” and not “towards.”

In my day job as an editor, we use AP Style. AP Style is that we should use “toward,” and not “towards” (along with a bazillion other rules about how language should be used).

Imagine me — if it had been “towards” and not “toward,” propelling myself away from my desk — the screech of chair wheels on hard wood, the groans of my chair being abruptly tilted as I ran from something that didn’t obey the rules I’ve come to know!

Fortunately, this is the Five Minute Friday group and not work (phew!).

I do love the language guardrails of an editing job (when they don’t drive me crazy).

They are so arbitrary sometimes, yet they also are reassuring.

In my head, they help us all present a consistent product. (That said, my employer has a whole set of exceptions for the things we do differently from AP Style, so we also have to be consistently consistent about exceptions.)

The first hurdle when I started working for my employer was the fact that AP Style does not use the Oxford (serial) comma. I had spent basically a lifetime being an Oxford comma snob. In general, my philosophy was, “The more punctuation the better.”

I’ve been at SmartBrief for going on five years now, however, and I have to admit that a sentence does look cleaner (usually) without the Oxford comma.

Usually, when I edit the While You Were Working newsletter, my bio says something about how I “want to save the world even if I can’t save the Oxford comma.” I swear I have had more reader emails about my Oxford comma comment than pretty much anything else I’ve ever said or written while working there!