Style Guides

When it comes to grammar, punctuation, and general formatting, there are a lot of gray areas that are often a matter of personal preference and experience. How are you supposed to know what to hyphenate, what to capitalize, where the punctuation belongs in dialog, and whether to use underlines or italics? Should you still use two spaces after a period? What about that confusing serial comma?

An editor doesn’t just guess, or go with what looks right. Your editor uses a style guide so that a manuscript consistently follows standard rules, and if you want to take the guesswork out of your style and formatting choices, you can use one, too.

You might remember style guides from school. Strunk and White is the first style guide many of us encountered; though not a very informative or specific one, it advises on matters of grammar and construction, and is meant to offer advice for writing well and consistently. If you went to high school in the United States and you wrote term papers, you probably had to assemble your references using MLA (Modern Language Association) style, a staple for general scholarly writing.

There are a lot of style guides out there. Different specializations have their own. Journalists generally use Associated Press style. Medical journals use AMA. The field of psychology has its own style. Chicago Manual of Style is common for literature, both fiction and non-fiction.

Many of the more widely-used style guides have online editions now, available for a subscription fee. It’s only fair that if you’d pay to buy the book, you’d pay to use the book without buying it. Chicago has a very thorough site, AP has an online edition, and AMA’s online guide has just gone live (making lots of medical writers and editors very happy!).

Is it worth getting a subscription to the online guide you use the most? It’s entirely a personal decision. It depends on how often you use it, how and where you use it, and if you’re the kind of person who takes work away from the screen; whether you find it easier or more satisfying to turn pages, or if you’re good at finding the magic keywords to enter into a search box. And, it’s worth a mention, how drastically your style guide changes with each revision. It may be worth it to have access to the latest edition at your fingertips without having to go and buy the book again. Some guides offer discounts if you buy the print edition and the subscription at the same time. Then again, I have colleagues who use the online search feature to give them the section numbers, then look up those sections in their dead-tree volumes. It’s all a matter of personal preference.

Here are some links to style guides online. Even if the sites themselves are subscription, some of them—including AP and Chicago—have free and searchable Q&A sections that are full of useful information… maybe even the information you’re looking for!

American Medical Association
American Psychological Association
Associated Press
Chicago Manual of Style
Modern Language Association

Tagged as: editing, grammar, Resources, style, writing