Editors kick the word "style" around a lot. Like spoken Chinese, what we mean often depends on the context and inflection. We work diligently to create and maintain style in its various meanings, but like all rules, style sometimes improves when you break it.

Sometimes style refers to a publication's "style guide." Ours is based on the Associated Press stylebook, but customized for different clients. For instance, our clients tend to treat elements like titles, dates and state names in different ways:

• In Semper Fi, which we publish for the Marine Corps League, we use the two-letter USPS abbreviations for states, dates are written 10 November 1775, and ranks are used with names at all times.
• NFIB's MyBusiness magazine follows AP for abbreviating names and dates, and titles are used only on a first reference.
• American Spirit uses its own approach to these and other elements.
• Our own suggested online style guide calls for using bullet points. Sentence fragments. In bold, and no puns (obviously this guy deserves a few bullets).

The point is that every publication has its own set of style rules for consistency in spelling, grammar, even the tense used in attributed quotations.

Then there are times when "style" refers to the overall voice -- some call it sound or tone or feeling -- of a publication. The style guide can have an effect on this:

For instance, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal use titles before names. So one reads about Mayor Michael Bloomberg on first reference, then Mr. Bloomberg thereafter. The tone is more formal, not so much deferential as polite. Quite different from, say, Rolling Stone.

In the corporate world, design and logo guidelines are standard. Companies and associations set up rules about how the logo may be used, for instance, or what colors are acceptable in company memos. Many organizations will just provide standard templates for spreadsheets, written documents and emails.

But what about your words? Does your organization need a standard style guide for the words in your written documents? If your publications don't use a style guide, follow along with me for a few moments. Even presentations, advertisements and other printed materials benefit from a standard written style.

A complex sentence is made up of two clauses: one independent clause (a simple sentence) which can stand on its own, and one dependent clause that would simply be a fragment if left alone. The dependent clause also contains the subordinating conjunction (the word which ties the two clauses together). Subordinating conjunctions are words such as "because," "although," "if," "when," "unless," etc. Are you still awake?

A common error occurs with this type of sentence though because there seems to be confusion on where exactly to pencil in the pesky little comma. The rule is simple:

It's a common mistake, and one that slipped by me recently, to describe the firing of three volleys of 7 rifles as at military funerals as a 21-gun salute. It's not.

A 21-gun salute is fired by pieces of artillery, not by rifles. According to the Navy's History Division, "Today, the national salute of 21 guns is fired in honor of a national flag, the soverign or chief of state of a foreign nation, a member of a reigning royal family, and the President, ex-President, and President-elect of the United States. It is also fired at noon of the day of the funeral of a President, ex-President, or President-elect, on Washington's Birthday, Presidents Day, and the Fourth of July. On Memorial Day, a salute of 21 minute guns is fired at noon while the flag is flown at half mast."

The rifle salute can be described as a "three-volley salute".

Just last week, my mind was having a little battle between the words "maximum" and "maximal," and it was driving me crazy. I had typed each word out a few dozen times as I wrote and rewrote a story. I had stared at them both for so long that they no longer even looked like words to me. So, to end the battle, I turned to the best resource I know for answering tough grammar questions: my colleagues here at Hammock.

To me, there is no better resource than the smart folks around me for hammering out the proper use of a hyphen. We talk about it over lunch, from opposite ends of the hallway. And, as you've heard us mention before, we use Instant Messenger to talk about pronouns and dependent clauses as much as we use it to discuss last night's episode of LOST.

But when some of us are up to our necks in a project or out of the office for lunch (or sleep), where do we go when our deepest thoughts about the subjunctive mood just won't rest?

Online, you'll find us logged on to:

• AP Stylebook online
• Grammar Girl
• Your Writing Guru
• Dr. Grammar

Off the shelf, you might find us grabbing:

• Strunk and White's Elements of Style (I'm surprised my copy is still in one piece.)
• Basic English Revisited: A Student's Handbook
• The Associated Press Stylebook
• The dictionary

There are dozens of other great resources out there. What's your favorite?

Bill's post earlier this week celebrated all that we love about magazines and their punny, punny headlines. But you'll notice here ("How to Write Headlines for the Web") we're playing it straight. And there's good reason for that.

When you're titling articles, posts and features online, your headline has to do a lot more than look pretty and act clever. Since headlines may show up as links, and often help with search engine results, they have to cut to the chase: Just tell us what the page is about.

Headline writers are like diners at The Old Country Buffet - they go right for the good stuff, and you'd best not stand in their way. There is no pun, no quibble, no stretch or rhyme or reason, no shaken-and-stirred metaphor they won't resort to in their quest to stop readers dead in their tracks. I know: I'm Bill, and I am a headline writer.

I wasn't always this way, although the underlying fascination with groaners and shaggy dog stories was there from the start. When I worked as a reporter and later editor at the late Nashville Banner, the copy editors appended most of the headlines to our articles. They sat roughly in an inward facing square near the city desk, and we could hear them murmuring and often cackling amongst themselves as they clarified our prose and debated zinger headlines.

There were many - and many that did not make it into the paper. Such a one was proposed for a wire story about a woman who had murdered her husband and stuffed his carcass under the house. "I'm walking the floor over you!" sang out a merry voice from the copy desk, convulsing the entire newsroom. The one headline I remember as the all-time greatest was about a grisly local murder whose perpetrator tried to cover up with arson: "Headless body found in gutted church." If "Wayne's World" had been out then, we would all have salaamed in appreciation.

But since assuming editorship over various titles at Hammock Publishing, I had to get into the headline business. Turns out I have something of a knack for it, and my colleagues sometimes ask me to swot out a headline for them.

[After the jump, read more about the joys of headlining.]

Have you ever gotten an e-mail where someone asked you to confirm your shipping address to insure that your package arrives on time? What about a message telling you that your vote could drastically effect the outcome of a race?

These types of mistakes are all too common. In fact, as I type this in Word, its spell-checking system recognizes that one of the examples above is wrong, but not the other.

Here is a list of some of the worst offenders I've seen lately:

“Only” can be an adjective or an adverb. As such, it should be placed immediately in front of the word it restricts. Otherwise, the sentence changes meaning.

Let's take, for example, the title line from Gene Pitney's 1962 hit, "Only Love Can Break a Heart."

As it is written, the sentence says that nothing else except love can cause heartbreak. Fair enough, although maybe not exactly true.

"Have your photo's enlarged for just $1.99!"

Those were the flashing red words on a huge drug-store marquee when I drove by last week. And as I type this in Word, it doesn't understand the problem.

The problem is: That sentence -- the word "photos" -- does not need an apostrophe.

Apostrophes serve several purposes, the two most common are to show possession and contraction. (As a refresher, a contraction is a shortened form of a word or group of words where the missing letters are replaced by an apostrophe. Example: we+will=we'll, should+not=shouldn't.)

The word "photos" as it should be above is simply plural, not possessive. And it's certainly not a contraction.

Example: We'll take John's car to the meeting.
Example: Don't let Julia's daughter leave before giving her a hug.

Other not-so-common uses of the apostrophe
An apostrophe is used when one or more letters or numbers have been left out of a word.

Example: I am part of the graduating class of '90.
Example: Top o' the mornin' to you!

Another rule, one that looks funny and is hard to remember because it does: When a word calls for two apostrophes, simply eliminate the second one.

Example: Patrick is learning the do's and don'ts of driving in Nashville traffic.

Which brings up the final common use of apostrophes: Use an apostrophe when creating the plural form of a letter, number, sign or word discussed as a word, not as its form of speech.

Example: He knows the do's, now he just needs to work on the don'ts.
Example: Please remove all B's and 9's from this page.

If you're just bustin' at the seams to learn more, Grammar Girl takes the apostrophe discussion a step further in a recent post. Enjoy! We sure do.

It hurts coming from your own mother sometimes...

We're always reading and listening to the ways people use words. Listen carefully and you'll notice it too. For some reason lately, and more often it seems, people are using reflexive pronouns incorrectly.

"If you need more information, please call myself or Megan."

Well, you can't call myself, only I can call myself. It's just that simple.

Even presidential candidates are using the words incorrectly as the Wall Street Journal pointed out just last week in an article titled Me, Myself and I.

So, here's a quick reminder list of reflexive pronouns: myself, yourself (singular), yourselves (plural), himself, herself, itself, ourselves, themselves.

A reflexive pronoun is used for three primary reasons:

• When the object of the sentence is the same as the subject (1)
• As the object of a preposition, referring back to the subject (2)
• To emphasize the subject (3)

(1) Example: Laura cut herself while slicing onions for dinner. (Laura is the subject and the what/who that was cut.)

(2) Example: I took this picture by myself.

(3) Example: The boss himself set our deadline. (A reflexive pronoun used this way is also called an "intensive pronoun.")

Simply put in my Basic English Revisited handbook: A personal pronoun is called a "reflexive pronoun" when it reflects back on the subject or refers to it.

I, myself, already knew that.