I got started in the journalism industry as a copy editor. (Well, technically, I got started in journalism as a high school student writing a column for Seventeen magazine back in 2000, but I still consider that mostly a fluke.) While I was not a particularly good copy editor, some of the habits die hard. As an editor today, I cannot stop myself from copy editing as I go. Many of these changes are miniscule, like removing two spaces after a period, adding the serial comma (I will not call it the Oxford comma because I find that pretentious), or changing dashes to em dashes.
Others are a little more fraught: Quite a bit of my time corresponding with writers is explaining why I have lowercased their title when it does not appear before their name — as in, "Hortense Snickerjit is an assistant professor," not "an Assistant Professor." Blame the Associated Press Style Guide, which STAT uses in lightly adapted form, not me! (Bless STAT's senior copy and production editor, Sarah Mupo, for deciding to overrule AP and embrace the serial comma.)
But the change that I make the most is to add a humble little space to the word "healthcare."
Virtually every First Opinion submission comes to me with health care as one word. I once had a writer get a little testy with me for changing it to two per our house style. They explained that they thought there was a fundamental difference between "healthcare" and "health care," with "healthcare" being appropriate for referring to the industry. But I stood firm, both because I am a rule follower and because copy-editing is a crucial but often thankless job. I will always take the copy editor's side.
But the tide may be turning on us.
Even in 2014, the Associated Press' Facebook account reminded people that it was two words. (It looks like this was reposted from the organization's Twitter account.) Commenters, especially those from the industry, were unimpressed.
In 2017, during a style chat, the AP Twitter account presented both sides of the issue. Some health care journalists were furious at the idea that they might remove the space. "One word makes it look like hideous bureaucratese. Keep two words!" one person replied. (I should note that person included two spaces after the period. I deleted the extra space because it offended my eyes.)
Back in March 2020, when health care was on everyone's masked lips, the AP's Twitter account said curtly, "It's still health care, two words." Again, many were unconvinced.
And back in April, Sarah Mupo went to the conference of ACES: The Society for Editing, where she recalls that an AP Style Guide rep said that they would not be changing health care to one word this year.
I confess that health care as two words does seem increasingly out of step. In this way, it's a bit like "internet." Most people stopped lowercasing "internet" long ago, but the Associated Press stuck with "Internet" for a very long time before reversing course in 2016. When that change happened, many technologists were furious. At the time, I was a technology editor, and a writer I had worked with for years told me he would stop writing for me if my outlet followed suit and lowercased the I in internet. (He continued his boycott for about a year and then came back, not mentioning his previous stance.) I didn't have a high-minded objection to that change, but I did have a parochial one: Suddenly, perfectly relevant pieces that uppercased Internet looked archaic, a little silly, like referring to e-mail instead of email. (The AP style guide nixed that hyphen in 2011; it also changed "web site" to "website" in 2010. As far as I can tell, The New Yorker, bless 'em, is holding onto the hyphen in email as strongly as it is holding onto the diaeresis on cooperate.)
I suspect that at some point in the near future, the Associated Press will give in to the tide of angry health care industry folks and nix the space. But until that day happens — and Sarah Mupo gives it her blessing — I'm going to keep inserting that space in every "healthcare" in First Opinion.
Got an opinion on health care vs. healthcare? Email me! Maybe it would be fun to have dueling op-eds on the topic in First Opinion, especially over the holidays.
This week on First Opinion: In a gorgeous first-person essay, clinical psychologist Sarah Darghouth writes about what it's like when an international crisis invades the therapy room. In the wake of the approval of the first two gene therapy treatments for sickle cell disease, Jennifer Fields — who has lived with SCD for 39 years — writes about the mistrust between the sickle cell community and the U.S. health care system. Peter Shen of Siemens Healthineers North America proposes a Hippocratic Oath for medical AI. Anjali Garg and Amanda Ruth shed a light on the challenge of navigating health care coverage for children with complex medical needs. Jeremy L. Shane has an intriguing idea for how to completely revamp the way weight-loss drugs are paid for. Three surgeons explain why abortion bans and restrictions will make it harder to practice in-utero surgery. Might a well-intended FDA policy end up hurting children with cancer? What does Big Weed have in common with Big Tobacco? And on the podcast this week, I spoke with Rep. Raul Ruiz about his recent First Opinion on the shortage of infectious disease doctors, and what it was like for him to go from emergency physician to member of Congress.
Recommendation of the week: The new CBC podcast "Gay Girl Gone" tells the story of a lesbian Syrian blogger who went viral in 2011 — and was not what she seemed. It's a fascinating tale of the internet and raises important questions for journalists about how to balance the need to verify claims with the humanitarian imperative of protecting vulnerable people.
(If there are typos in this email, remember: I never said I was a good copy editor.)
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