AP Style in Sports Journalism

In this week reading and lecture we learned some about AP Style for journalism purposes. We went through many different categories and how to use AP Style in regards with them. I want to look at AP Style in a more specific manner, through a sport perspective. I will discuss capitalization, writing numbers and scores and when to use abbreviations.

1. Capitalization

First you must know when to capitalize regarding different sport terms. If you are taking about different sport leagues such as the NBA or MLB, you will always want to make sure they are capitalized. I will list an incorrect example of capitalization in red.

The lakers are a team in the NBA.

You may be wondering what is wrong with this? I mean the NBA is a league so it should be capitalized, and it is. The part that is incorrect is that “lakers” should be “Lakers”. When you are talking about a team, it should be capitalized.

2. Writing numbers and scores

If you are planning on doing anything related to sports journalism, you must have some knowledge on how to write numbers and scores under AP Style. A good rule of thumb with numbers is to spell out numbers that are single digits and use numerals for numbers that are double digit. Here is an incorrect example of numbers.

There were 3 goals scored.

Instead, this should be written as three, because it is a single digit number. There is an important exception with this rule. You should use numerals if they are included in ending scores. A correct example would be “The Yankees beat the Braves 10-3.” You must put a hyphen between the two scores and should put the winning score before the losing score.

3. When to use abbreviations

A key thing to remember is you do not need to spell out common abbreviations.

The Yankees are a team in the Major League Baseball.

This example above is incorrect. You would put “The Yankees are a team in the MLB.” The MLB is a common abbreviation. With this said, you do not want to abbreviate leagues if it is not a common abbreviation. An incorrect example is below.

The Yankees play in the AL.

Instead, you would say “The Yankees play in the American League.”

Recap

Now I want to pose a couple of questions to you all. First, what area of AP style do you feel you struggle with the most? Secondly, is there any specific tip from this blog you feel will help you to overcome your problem? If so, what tip is it? To close I just want to remind you that AP style is something that is not memorized. You will need to use resources and over time you get a better feel for how to use this style correctly. Before this class I had never heard of AP style. I am still trying to get used to it myself, and hopefully you all can use these topics to help in your own AP style journey. To summarize these three main points, I have put some useful tips below that should help simplify and make these easier to remember. (Andrew, 2014, n.p.)

Tips to remember:

· spell out all numbers under ten

· put a hyphen between scores (winning score goes first)

· capitalize proper nouns

· it is not necessary to spell out common abbreviations.

Work cited:

Andrew, K. (2014, January 17). Sports ap style guide. Retrieved February 17, 2021, from https://northstarnews.org/10944/north-star-tutorials/sports-ap-style-guide/