Is it disloyal to admit that I admire, sympathize with, even like AP style? It’s true that Chicago will always be my first love. And 80 percent of the AP Stylebook is just alphabetized terms in loose chapters. To those of us with wandering eyes and a shaky grasp of the alphabet, that’s just cruel. Sure, it’s straightforward, but if I want to know about commas, it’s pretty well guaranteed I’ll get stuck reading about colloquialisms, the Commonwealth of Independent States, and commodities before I discover I’m to look up the entry under punctuation. Where, of course, I’ll find Purim, Pulitzer Prizes, and a direction to the punctuation chapter. Well, why didn’t you just send me there in the first place? (On the other hand, ask me about Lithuanian independence!)

But AP is great for the applications it’s designed for—fitting a lot of information in not a lot of space, and making sure pretty much anyone will understand. It’s not a collection of literary tradition and best practices like Chicago. It’s a living manual to getting everything right and getting it to press, quickly. No copyeditor with a deadline breathing down her neck gets tempted into reading about colloquialisms when she’s looking for commodities. It’s fast and it’s practical.

A lot of AP guidelines are elegant, too, like the rules for numbers. Numbers always mean a compromise between consistency and common sense, so there are a lot of exceptions in any guide. But the AP’s basic concepts can be stated in three sentences: Spell out a single digit (one, eight, 10). Use figures for measurements, scores, and years (6 feet, a 5-year-old girl, 1986, a 3-6 decision). And don’t be an idiot (a thousand times thank you, a quarter mile, fourscore and seven years ago). See? Easy!

It almost makes up for that ridiculousness about plurals.*

*A good writer would leave it there. A grammar geek would say “Apostrophe only for proper nouns ending in S? For appearance’ sake? You’ve gotta be freakin’ kidding me.” I guess we know which I am today.