=17. Rules
While every well-regulated newspaper has rules of its own
governing the use of capital letters, commas, dashes, parentheses, and
other marks of punctuation, and any article written by a reporter will
be punctuated according to the individual style of the paper in which it
is printed, no matter how it may have been punctuated originally, it is
nevertheless worth while to offer the following general rules of
punctuation for the guidance of news writers. And it would be well for
every properly trained journalist to have these rules well in hand; for
in the eyes of the editor and the printer, bad punctuation is worse than
bad spelling, because the meaning of a misspelled word usually can be
deciphered, while that of an improperly punctuated sentence is often
hopeless. For one, therefore, who hopes to do successful journalistic
work a thorough knowledge of the following rules of punctuation is
practically a necessity.
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