How do you handle adding nullable columns to each other in a query?

Currently whenever I write a query that is adding columns that can contain nulls I resort to wrapping each field in isnull or coalesce, such as coalesce(score1,0) + coalesce(score2,0).
Is there a better way to handle this, or is this the standard practice?

Oracle provides NVL() for this scenario, ISNULL() is the equivalent in MS SQL Server. You could disguise all this in a VIEW to make your code clearer.

StackExchange Database Administrators Q#1031, answer score: 4