Watch Your Words: Journalistic Writing and Editing for the Digital Age

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.

Marda Dunsky, a print journalist and journalism scholar, is an assistant professor in residence at Northwestern University in Qatar. Dunsky has 15 years of service at Northwestern University in Evanston. As a member of the Medill School of Journalism faculty, she has taught print editing, basic reporting, global journalism, and a seminar of her design, ＂Reporting the Arab and Muslim Worlds.＂ She has also served as an adviser to international students in the Medill MSJ program. She has held editing and reporting positions at newspapers including source and copy editor on the national-foreign news desk of the Chicago Tribune and Arab affairs reporter at The Jerusalem Post.