In print for twenty years, Watch Your Words is a brief and accessible handbook for mastering best practices of journalistic writing. This new, fifth edition includes tips from experts with experience across the journalistic spectrum on best practices that predate the digital age while resonating within it.
The fifth edition also includes new content on implicit bias and inclusive storytelling—prevalent themes in digital age journalism that reflect how journalists are increasingly aware of, and acting on, social impacts of framing and language that they use in their stories.
Watch Your Words continues to be distinguished from other journalism reference works by its brevity. It provides accessible baseline instruction in its core content of punctuation, grammar, usage and updated entries on Associated Press style through clear-cut examples, self-quizzes, and answer keys. It also presents sections on accuracy and fact-checking, brevity, clarity, and use of direct quotations, with exercises, as well as an editing guide. Where digital grammar-fix and spell-check programs are useful, Watch Your Words provides a succinct yet deeper dive to help journalists and other media professionals master basic yet essential wordsmithing tools of their trades.