Places, Time, Other Usage Guides
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Places, Time, Other Usage Guides |
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Place Names |
Transliterations of place names from non-Roman alphabets or romanizations from syllabic writing systems can often be tricky, especially when you have a breaking news
story. For any place not listed in this Style Guide, dpa
generally uses the name as indexed in The Times Atlas
of the World Comprehensive Edition. The many forms of
name that one place may have are exhaustively listed in the
online Getty
Thesaurus of Geographic Names. To use it, you do need to
have a fairly good idea in advance of how the name might be
spelled. Another approach is to send a query using just
a fragment of the name to an enormous U.S. database, the
World
Geographic Names Server, which is maintained by
the U.S. National Imagery and Mapping Agency. The
normal search time is 40 seconds and requests often time
out, so searches may prove frustrating.
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Time & Measures |
Times mentioned in stories should generally have the
equivalent Universal Time (GMT) in
parentheses after them. A useful online tool is the Time Zone Converter which allows you to write in
any local time and see its GMT equivalent. Daylight saving
is automatically taken into account. See this Style
Guide's Punctuation page for
rules on time notation. The only measurements used in the dpa cast
are those adopted internationally. Advice on how to
convert American and other non-standard measurements can
be found on a U.S. Standards Institute site, but naturally you should
take care to adopt British spelling: litre not
"liter", metre not "meter" and so on. A handy
conversion tool for all sorts of unusual measurements is
provided by the FLW Data Converter which creates a temporary calculator
in your browser screen.
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Usage |
Apart from dpa's own Style Guide there are several
news-copy style books accessible via the Internet. They
have no authority with the dpa desks, but you may find
them useful if you are trying to find cogent arguments
when making a style choice on something that is not yet
covered in this Style Guide. A traditional style guide, with the entries listed in alphabetical order, is available online from The Guardian. The Montreal Gazette Style guide is handy on usage, but the
spelling is Canadian. A U.S. journalism-school handbook,
The News
Watch Project Style Guide, lists expressions that may be offensive to minority groups.
Both pages of links were compiled by Jean-Baptiste Piggin. Further suggestions welcome.
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