COMMON GRAMMATICAL, PUNCTUATION & SPELLING ERRORS

 Advisor, not adviser

 African-American hyphenated; Asian American (no hyphen); Native American
(no hyphen)
 Alumnus: one male graduate
 Alumna: one female graduate
 Alumnae: two or more female grads
 Alumni: two or more male or mixed-gender grads; avoid “alumnae/i
 alumni association: capitalize only when “Union College” precedes it
 B.A., B.S., M.A.: include periods
 bachelor’s degree: lowercase
 board of trustees: capitalize only when “Union College” precedes it
 chair: not chairwoman, chairman, or chairperson
 Class of 2008 (not Class of ’08)
 Committee: capitalize only in full name, e.g., the Curriculum Committee
 course work: two words
 emeritus, emerita, emeriti: no italics; directly follows the word “professor”
 every day two words unless used as an adjective—
e.g., “an everyday event”
 first-year student: hyphenated as a compound adjective
 freshman: when possible, avoid
 Latino, Latina

A FEW WORDS ABOUT TECHNOLOGY

The Associated Press recently changed its style on e-mail to email, cell phone to
cellphone and smart phone to smartphone to reflect increasingly common usage. It also
adopted Kolkata as its style for the Indian city formerly known as Calcutta.

Use a hyphen with other e- terms: e-book, e-business, e-commerce.