What are style guides? This is an excellent question. When I was in high school, I thought all papers were written in the same format and followed the same rules. My English teachers never gave me any reason to doubt this. Those teachers made it sound like the sun rose and set based on the handbook from the Modern Language Association. This hallowed handbook contained all the rules students had to follow to format, punctuate, and generally write our papers correctly. Essentially, that’s all a style guide is: a set of guidelines put in place by an authority.
Did I carry that handbook to college with me?
You’d better believe it.
But when I got to college, I learned that there are other ways to format, punctuate, and write grammatically correct documents. My precious MLA Handbook suddenly had competition for its special spot on the bookshelf. That’s because the style guide needed depends on what kind of document you are producing. Today, we’ll do a brief overview of some of the more popular style guides.
Style Guide Options
APA
APA stands for the American Psychological Association. This style refers to the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. The audience for this style is mostly made up of students and professionals in the social or behavioral sciences. Because of this, presenting quantitative and qualitative results in tables and figures factors heavily into this style. If you’re writing about data, there’s a strong chance you’ll use this style.
CMOS
The Chicago Manual of Style is popular for book editing, but some academic fields, such as the humanities and social sciences, also favor it. The manual is definitely comprehensive and covers everything from style to source citations to copyright law history. Because it is so detailed, CMOS is now the preferred guide for more than just books. Short stories, blogs, and creative nonfiction all rely on CMOS.
MLA
MLA style is used mostly for papers on languages, literature, theater, film, and cultural studies. While the handbook itself focuses on source citations, the MLA website offers writing and formatting tips.
AP
Based on The Associated Press Stylebook, AP style is geared toward journalists. The news industry depends on this style, so the AP releases an updated version of it every year. Over half of the AP guide is composed of glossaries that provide preferred spellings and abbreviations or remind journalists how to select the proper word in a given context.
Other Style Guides
There are more style guides than just the four listed above. In fact, some publications have their own guides for in-house use, such as large newspapers like The New York Times. Books or series will often have their own guides so the editing team can check preferred spellings or very specific punctuation matters that wouldn’t be covered by the in-house style guide.
Are style guides really that different?
You know that each of these guides governs publishing in different fields, but it isn’t just the fields that set each style apart. For one thing, the guides don’t have the same rules regarding citations. CMOS provides two options for source citations: notes with a bibliography or author-date. APA uses an author-date style source citation, but it’s not the same as Chicago’s. MLA specifies that source citations should be in the author-page format, which is a simplified version of author-date. And AP style doesn’t have a bibliography; it just mentions sources in the text.
In fact, most of the styles can’t even agree on which dictionary is preferred. CMOS designates Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate as its dictionary of choice. The AP advises using Webster’s New World College Dictionary, yet MLA style doesn’t make a designation.
In other aspects, like titles or possessives, some of the styles agree on the proper treatment. For example, CMOS and MLA advocate for lowercase prepositions in titles. AP and APA styles say that titles should capitalize all words of four letters or more whether they are prepositions or not. MLA, APA, and CMOS all say proper names take an apostrophe and an s if they are possessives. However, in AP style, if the proper name ends with an s, you only need to add an apostrophe.
These kinds of small details build up to form a style. It’s important to know which style you need to use before you start writing. Otherwise, you can spend a lot of time making tedious little changes throughout your work.
Do style guides matter?
Why are any of these guides important? The guidelines promote consistency within a discipline or publication. It helps the editor since all their writers are following the same format for a given publication. This also makes it easier for reading comprehension since there is a familiar structure for the reader to follow. And as a writer, one of your goals is to communicate your ideas as clearly as possible, right? So, following the style guide for your discipline will help you reach that goal.
At BulletProof Writing Services, my clients primarily use CMOS or the AP style guide. My goal is to help make your writing as strong and clear as possible by adhering to your chosen style. Are you ready for a proofreader? If so, let me help make your writing bulletproof.
Still have questions? Maybe you’re wondering what proofreading is? Or who needs a proofreader? Learn the answers to those questions and more on my blog, Becoming BulletProof.