|
_________________________________
 Books
Brochures and booklets
Kits
Manuals
Position papers
Reports
©Web text SSR Incorporated 2000, 2009
©Web architecture Bogart Szabo Design Inc. 2000
©Web design revisions Anartist & Associates. 2009
For permission to use materials on this Web site,
e-mail ssr@ssrinc.com.
|
Excerpt: Use or Usage
SSR: Contractor
Editor's note
Use or Usage: A Rural Electric Guide to Style is a supplement to the Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual. Reflecting today's preferences when writing about rural electrification issues, it harmonizes the style of all rural electric statewide publications. It will also help editors in their most important task-making meaning precise.
Although the entries that follow are for the most part self-explanatory, some specifics are of particular importance in the rural electric world.
Protection of the environment, for example, is a key concern today. This guide, therefore, calls for "Earth" to take a capital letter when the desired emphasis is that we live on a planet with a single ecosystem. Lowercase the first letter in "earth" when the reference is to the ground, soil, land and the like.
Rural electric editors should be especially vigilant about not falling prey to the common, irritating error of confusing the word "usage" with the word "use." Usage has a limited meaning, referring to the way language is practiced. Talk about energy or electric use, therefore, not usage.
Many words, of course, may be used interchangeably in some senses. "Energy" and "power," "electric energy" and "electricity," "generate" and "produce," "demand" and "use" are some examples in our field. The professional rural-electric editor, however, must know when substituting one term for another results in loss of meaning. The definitions in Use or Usage: A Rural Electric Guide to Style will help you zero in on the technical connotations of some of the terms we use in our daily work. This book, however, is not a replacement for your dictionary, which as always, stands by to help you sort out these words and others.
— Shirley Sirota Rosenberg
|
|
