What is your style?

A guide to, well, style guides

Though many people cringe at the thought of a style guide (more rules!), us logophiles cherish them — after all, a cohesive language is our strongest connection to our world. What’s more, style guides can be helpful and yes, even user-friendly, if you know where to turn for what. Let’s see if we can break down some barriers and spread the word love.

MLA Style Manual

The Modern Language Association of America’s (MLA) Style Manual is the gold standard for graduate students, scholars and professional writers, according to its own intro. It’s especially prominent in the humanities. I know I’m not alone in my lifelong grudge against MLA for the many long nights spent in college with this guide in front of me making sure every last comma is in place in my Works Cited page. Ugh.

APA Style Manual

The American Psychological Association Style Manual is based on the believe that “the best scientific writing is sparce and straightforward.” Used primarily for scientific scholarly works, APA gives guidelines for the construction of tables, presentation of statistics, selection of headers and other standards that scientists, perhaps, appreciate but that I find stifling.

The manual’s website (www.apastyle.org) is very nice though, and even includes quizzes and tutorials to keep your APA knowledge sharp.

Chicago Style Manual

The Chicago Style Manual has been published by the University of Chicago Press since first started in 1891, when it was just a single sheet. By 1903 it was extensive enough to fill a pamphlet. Today, it’s hundreds of pages long. My edition is one of my most prized possessions. See the complete history — and a PDF of the original guide — on its website.

The Chicago Manual is most prominent in works of fiction, but the latest edition also includes rules acknowledging the “increasing proportion of our users who work with magazines, newsletters, corporate reports, proposals, electronic publications, websites, and other nonbook or nonprint documents.”

AP Style Guide

This is my favorite, although years and years of novel reading has made me quite fond of the Chicago Manual, too. The AP guide is the grammatical Bible for newspapers and other news publications. Until recently, news articles were limited by the amount of space it could be given on the page, and is written for the quick communication of the most important facts of a story. To serve these goals, following AP style makes for sleek, efficient, accessible language. No serial commas. Abbreviations are encouraged when applicable.

On the down side, AP also gets uptight about being politically correct. Look in its alphabetically organize section of appropriate titles and names, and you’ll get the most up-to-date listing of names for every minority, among its many other listings.

What’s your style?

Believe it or not, there are times when a guide isn’t enough, or when the guide’s rule doesn’t make sense for your company or a particular project—M3 has one, sometimes with rules specific to a single client or project. You can create your own personal style guide rules to supplement your manual of choice. Everyone’s entitled to a little freedom of expression, even with grammar.