I discovered back (way back) in my college days that journalists look at the world a little differently than most other professionals, and we debate and obsess over things that most people may not even notice, pay attention to or care about.

In addition to being more cynical than average (which is a necessary characteristic of  good journalists), we can argue endlessly about punctuation, abbreviations and other forms of style. We hold style guides sacred. For that reason, we want to share a big decision for us. As of today, we will follow the AP Style Guide.

This decision to move to AP style was not made lightly – but it was made enthusiastically and endorsed and applauded by those at the company who produce sponsored and marketing content for enterprise and telecom leaders.  We know your main concern is ensuring enterprise IT efficiency, so we don’t expect most of you to notice the style changes, but there two things that may catch your eye.

1. AP style uses sentence case for headlines – we have been using title case, so what was this:
SDxCentral Makes Bold Move to AP style

Will now be this:
SDxCentral makes bold move to AP style

For a while you may see a mix of styles on some of our pages, so please excuse the inconsistency, but moving forward all headlines will be AP style.

2. The other big change – well, for us – is eliminating the serial comma (aka, Oxford or Harvard comma). So what would been this:
SDxCentral makes style move with passion, confidence, and enthusiasm.

Will now be this:
SDxCentral makes style move with passion, confidence and enthusiasm.

We’ll also apply AP style for enterprise IT and telecom acronyms, except where we are confident you, as a technology professional, won’t need something spelled out.

We believe that adhering to AP style, as opposed to our previous hybrid style guide, will result in a more consistent reader experience. Again, the changes are mostly subtle, but we suspect if we haven’t said something about the style change, we’d be hearing from folks, asking what was going on with our headlines as well from Harvard and Oxford alums looking for their comma.

There’s that journalistic cynicism again.