While the rest of the staff is scurrying to put the finishing touches on our Tribune “Official Guide To Queens” Special Edition, I figured I’d try to quickly spin something for my PRESS column. Since this column will run only in the PRESS, to shortcut the hectic week’s work I’ve revived a couple of the lighter items from the beginning of the year 2000 – before the PRESS was born.

Last month marked the 32nd Anniversary of our publishing company — thirty two years of covering the news and serving as a sounding board for the people of our borough. Strangely, we started in the same year that our present editor was born. Our art director was just a half a year old when our company was born. Most of the rest of the staff are younger than our business. Some in my position would worry that it makes them seem or feel old. Not the case! It gives me pride. We have endured. Our story continues.

We covered the borough in the 1970s without fax machines or computers. We covered the borough in the 1980s without email or the internet. And we have covered the borough in the 1990s utilizing technological hoohahs that didn’t exist back when we were born. Thirty two years after our birth, we feel pretty damn good.

We think we look pretty good too. We were the first community newspaper on the east coast to use 4-color printing. We were the first weekly in metro New York to build a website reaching hundreds of thousands of folks at home and across the globe who visit on the internet. We pioneered special editions like the Guide to Queens we are presently producing. Our original eight-page publication has given way to a new, modern publishing endeavor.

That publishing undertaking now includes the PRESS of Southeast Queens, the paper you hold in your hand.

We believe that the writing, reporting, advertising and commentary have similarly advanced to keep pace with today’s world and lead community journalism in a new challenging millennium.

The Company started in 1970 in a desk at the back of a Main St. real estate office. Its compass was a guy named Ackerman — a former school teacher driven by community issues and a commitment to service. And as the borough grew so did we. And Ackerman grew too! :-)

Since 1989, we’ve published out of our present home on the westbound service road of the LIE, two blocks from Utopia. When we first came to Queens there was no Long Island Expressway. Now, it serves not only as the world’s biggest parking lot but as the main thoroughfare connecting Manhattan to Long Island and uniting the diverse neighborhoods of our borough into one great community we call Queens.

For the past 23 years, I’ve been at the helm of the publishingship, steering it through the changing waters of our time. The face of Queens has changed. So has its heart and soul. It was wonderful back then. And it’s wonderful now — only different.

In 1992 we declared on our front page, “We Are The World.” As the most ethnically diverse place on earth, we certainly have brought that World’s Fair spirit into the new millennium. People from all corners of the globe now call Queens their home. For the most part they live here, in our Queens — in their Queens — in peace and harmony.

The face of Queens has changed since I first came here. The empty spaces are gone and old-timers struggle to keep the Queens they remember. The price of progress often impacts the suburban lifestyle and “quality of life” has become a shibboleth of community activists across the borough.

The new millennium has witnessed the arrival of our borough’s two millionth resident. And as we grow, we experience growing pains. Queens is maturing. Its growth is slowing. Its heart is beating strongly. The soul of Queens – its people – are strong, and varied and beautiful.

So, as we look back across the millennium divide, we see not an aging borough, nor an aging newspaper company, we see the legacy of wonder and riches that pave the way to our future.

And we reach out to a new community in Southeast Queens, extend our hand and hope to share that future with you.

We’d like to hear from you.

STYLE MANUAL: Consistency in writing is critical to its ease of understanding. Therefore, style manuals are maintained to guide the writers. Following the PRESS style manual will ensure clearly written presentations. Below find 25 rules compiled from various online sources on how to write well:

1. Always avoid awkward, affected alliterations.

2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.

3. Avoid clichés like the plague.
4. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.

5. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.

6. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.

7. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.

8. Contractions aren’t necessary.
9. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.

10. One should never generalize.
11. No sentence fragments.

12. Comparisons are as bad as clichés.
13. Never, ever use repetitive redundancies.

14. Profanity sucks.

15. Be more or less specific.

16. Be careful to use apostrophe’s correctly.

17. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.

18. One-word sentences? Eliminate.
19. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.

20. The passive voice is to be avoided.
21. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.

22. Proofread carefully to see whether you any words out.

23. While a transcendent vocabulary is laudable, one must nevertheless keep incessant surveillance against such loquacious, effusive, voluble verbosity that the calculated objective of communication becomes ensconced in obscurity.

24. Avoid run-on sentences they are hard to read and what you really should be doing is using commas and semicolons and even periods to break the sentence up into more digestible chunks.

25. And never start a sentence with a conjunction.

PROOFREAD: Ultimately, errors at our paper are the responsibility of the editor. She takes her job seriously and has the following over her desk: “Always proofread carefully to see if you any words out.”

PUNCTUATION COUNTS: An English professor wrote the words “Woman without her man is a savage” on the blackboard and directed his students to punctuate it correctly.

The men wrote: “Woman, without her man, is a savage.”

The women wrote: “Woman! Without her, man is a savage.”

REPORTER: A hot shot East Coast newspaper reporter was on assignment in West Virginia when he struck up a conversation with a young lady in a bar. After a half dozen drinks, he suggested they get their own bottle and retire to his motel room. Surprisingly enough, she readily agreed.

“Say, how old are you anyway?” the reporter asked as the obviously young lass was disrobing.

“Thirteen.” she replied with a shy smile.

“Thirteen??? My God girl!!! You get those clothes back on at once and get the hell outta here! Are you crazy?” he thundered.

Pausing briefly at the door as she left, the perplexed nymphet smiled and said, “Superstitious, huh ?”

QUESTION: We haven’t checked it out, though it seems plausible, here’s a recent email inquiry circulating in cyberspace:

“Just for fun, try to identify this outfit of over 500 employees with the following statistics:

29 have been accused of spousal abuse; 7 have been arrested for fraud; 19 have been accused of writing bad checks; 117 have bankrupted at least two businesses; 3 have been arrested for assault; 71 cannot get a credit card due to bad credit; 14 have been arrested on drug-related charges; 8 have been arrested for shoplifting; 21 are current defendants in lawsuits; In 1998 alone, 84 were stopped for drunk driving.

Give up?”

ANSWER: “It’s the 535 members of your United States Congress – the same group that perpetually cranks out hundreds upon hundreds of new laws designed to keep the rest of us in line.”

SUCCESS: “Sir, what is the secret of your success?” a reporter asked a bank president.

“Two words”

“And, sir, what are they?”

“Right decisions.”

“And how do you make right decisions?”

“One word.”

“And, sir, what is that?”

“Experience.”

“And how do you get experience?”

“Two words”

“And, sir, what are they?”

“Wrong decisions”

 YOGI BERRA: “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

LANGUAGE: A linguistics professor was lecturing to his class one day. “In English,” he said, “A double negative forms a positive. In some languages, though, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative. However, there is no language wherein a double positive can form a negative.”

A voice from the back of the room piped up, “Yeah, right.”

TWO RULES FOR LIFE:

1.Don’t tell people everything you know.

2.