The Rules...

I still have an old reference book about writing that I was assigned in Junior High called Writer's Inc. I still have the little spiral-bound booklet of AP Style. Wedged neatly alongside is my Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (which was signed by my high school principal as a graduation award) that I now use primarily when playing Scrabble or doing crosswords. Of course, now I'm hooked on Sudoku instead so the poor, little reference book gathers more dust.

Since starting my new job, however, I have had to brush the cobwebs away from a lot of the ideas contained in these books. Writing full-time in a professional capacity is an incredibly different experience than writing for myself, for my fiction. Sure, I've been doing a freelance article here and there and some copy writing for my father's business on the side. But my those technical details seem to have been buried in the dust of apathy.

• Do I spell out dollars? (five dollars, $5, 5 dollars)
  
• Do I use decimal places for cents? ($5, $5.00)
• Do I use periods between the letters of an acronym? (FAA or F.A.A., 3 am or 3 a.m.)
• Do I capitalize Settlement Agreement? (Don't ask)
• Do I spell capitalize with a "tol" or an "tal?" (Yes, I really am that dumb sometimes)

Best get to the point, Gnomey. I think I take for granted the freedom of the mediums I move in, namely fiction and online. In the first, I have poetic license (passed my road test on the first try!) plus a flair for unusual sentence structure and unique description. I can start a sentence with and or but without qualms. In the online world, writing is obviously a more fast paced undertaking. In fact, this post is getting a little long for most online attention spans. Everything is "btw," "np," and such. (In fact, I almost used one of these with my boss today. Whoops.)

In so many areas, my generation has lightened things up, made things a little less stodgy and formal. Okay, it may not have been my generation in particular (though we do rock) but just a general timing issue. Dress codes around offices now include jeans. Adults are addressed with their first names. Sex shops have windows and helpful staff. Gender is no longer an either/or issue. I guess we can chalk writing as one more area in which we have come through in our baggy pants with all of our "dude"'s, broken the rules, ignored objection and tradition, and splayed ourselves out on the couch with our flip-flops on the coffee table.

What do I think? Np.