Many inexperienced writers struggle to follow AP Style guidelines that pertain to representing numbers in articles or essays. One of the most basic rules is to spell out numbers one to nine, both cardinal numbers like "one," "two" and "three;" and ordinal numbers like "first," "second" and "third." For numbers ten or above, Arabic figures such "11," "12" or "13" are used. Another AP style rule relating to numbers says commas should be used to distinguish numbers with four or more digits, such as "This town has 26,000 people." However, commas are never used in years or street addresses. Large numbers in the millions or higher, are spelled out instead of written out. Also large numbers greater than a million are rounded off and expressed as a decimal, such as "2.75 million," rather than "2,752,123."
People are generally referred to by their first name, middle initial and last name when written using AP style with their full name is used only in the first reference. Thereafter, only their last name is used. Also, proper titles are generally capitalized and abbreviated and put before the person's name, with the exception of the word "President." Titles, such as "M.D." or "Jr." follow the person's name. In general, courtesy titles, such as "Mr." and "Mrs." are not used in AP style unless there is a mention of two or more family members in the news article that might eliminate confusion by using the courtesy title; for example "Mrs. Smith responded to Smith's death."
Abbreviations, particluarly acyronyms, should be used with caution. The names of organizations, firms, agencies, universities, groups or other collective bodies should be spelled out in the first reference. The second time the name is used, it may be abbreviated or presented in the form of an acyronym. In AP style, the spelled-out name is never followed by the abbreviated name in parenthesis as it is assumed that the abbreviation refers to the first reference. Organizations with acronyms that are unfamiliar should be avoided and the name should be spelled out in its entirety. When including an address, the word "street" may be abbreviated, as "St.," or "Ave." for "Avenue" and so forth.
The use of punctuation, including colons and hyphens, can sometimes be tricky when adhering AP style. Colons are used to express the clock time, for example, "8:15 am." The exception is when the clock is right on the hour, which is expressed as "10 a.m." (as opposed to "10:00 a.m."). Hyphens are used to express phrasal adjectives, such as "well-known," but not for verbs ending with an "-ly" suffix, such as "Gravely ill." Hyphens are also used to express a number combination or number plus a noun of measurement, such as "six-foot-high;" and also used with prefixes, such as "ex-husband."
Time is usually referred to as "a.m." or "p.m," unless the time is described through words such as "tonight" or "this morning" to avoid being redundant. The use of time is described by putting the time and then the date when listing an event. Newspapers do not generally use the day of the week and the date to describe when an event will occur.
The general AP style rule says that the names of holidays, historic events and special events are capitalized, such as "Mother's Day" and "Christmas;" however, seasons are not capitalized, nor are the points on a compass. Words such as "East" and "West" are capitalized only when they are the name of a recognized geographical area such as "the South" or "Southern California." Capital letters are also used for the proper nouns including the names of nationalities, races and tribes and the names of books, plays, songs, movies and TV programs.