Style guide

Traditonally, a style guide (often called a style manual or stylebook) is a work that dictates what form of language should be used. These style guides are principally used by academia and publishers.

In such works, style can have two meanings:

Publication conventions for markup style, such as whether book and movie titles should be written in italics; expression of dates and numbers; how references should be cited.
Literary considerations of prose style, such as best usage, common errors in grammar, punctuation and spelling; and suggestions for precision, fairness and the most forceful expression of ideas.

However, there are some modern style guides that are designed for use by the general public. These tend to use the second, but not the first, of the two meanings of 'style' given above.

Some style guides consider or focus on aspects of graphic design, such as typography and white space. Many Web sites have style guides. These often focus on the visual or technical aspects.

Style guides used by publishing houses, newspapers and academia

Style guides used by publishing houses and newspapers set out rules that dictate that one acceptable form should be used rather than other acceptable forms. For instance, English can be written in a variety of typefaces or fonts. Some words, such as judgment/judgement, can be written in two or more ways. Some people choose to use italics when referring to book titles, or enclose short-story titles in quotation marks, others may not. A style guide used by a publishing house would state what font, spelling, italics and punctuation should be used.

A major purpose of these style guides is consistency. They are rulebooks for writers to ensure language is used consistently and presentation is uniform. Authors of books are often asked or required to use a style guide in readying their work for publication. Style guides used by universities are particularly rigorous in their preferred style for citing sources: They are required of scholars submitting research articles to academic journals.

Most American newspapers base their style on The Associated Press, but also have their own style guides for local terms and individual preferences. For many years, the Chicago Tribune style insisted on simplified spelling, such as frate for "freight", thru and thoro for "through" and "thorough", but the paper has dropped most of these spellings.

Other style guides

Other style guides have as their audience the general public. Some of these adopt a similar approach to style guides for publishing houses and newspapers. Others, such as Fowler's Modern English Usage (3rd edition) report how language is used in practice in a given area, outline how phrases, punctuation and grammar are actually used. Since they are for the general public, they cannot require one form of a word or phrase to be preferred over another, though they may make recommendations, and sometimes strong recommendations at that.

These guides can be used by anyone interested in writing in a standard form of a language. As they, like dictionaries and encyclopaedias, report usage, they change with the times as new constructions, phrases and spellings become generally accepted.

To give an idea of how this approach, it is useful to consider what Burchfield and observers have stated about Fowler's. On one hand, Burchfield notes: 'Linguistic correctness is perhaps the dominant theme of this book'. But he also writes: 'I believe that 'stark preachments' belong to an earlier age of comment on English usage'. Indeed, John Updike, writing in The New Yorker commented: 'To Burchfield, the English language is a battlefield upon which he functions as a non-combatant observer'.

Some style guides in English

Academic

ACS Style Guide: style for scientific papers published in journals of the American Chemical Society
American Medical Association Manual of Style: style for medical papers published in journals of the American Medical Association
styleAPA Style: academic style for the social sciences by the American Psychological Association
American Sociological Association Style Guide: academic style for the social sciences by the American Sociological Association
Scientific Style and Format: The CBE Manual for Authors, Editors, and Publishers: style for scientific papers published by the Council of Science Editors, a group formerly known as the Council of Biology Editors
The Chicago Manual of Style: mostly publishing conventions; judging by Amazon's sales figures, this is the most commonly used American English style guide.
MHRA Style Guide: academic style for the arts and humanities published by the Modern Humanities Research Association; available for free download (see article); based in the United Kingdom
MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers: academic style for the arts and humanities by the Modern Language Association of America
"Turabian": popular name for a widely used academic style guide based on the Chicago Manual
Words into Type: publishing conventions, less scholarly, more accessible than the Chicago Manual

For a summary and comparison of academic style guides, see Style Manuals and Writing Guides by the UCLA University Library

Journalism

Associated Press Stylebook: self-indexed; the foremost guide to newspaper style in the United States
BBC News Style Guide: from the British Broadcasting Corporation
The Guardian Style Guide: from The Guardian (United Kingdom)
The Times Style and Usage Guide: from The Times (United Kingdom)
The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage: The Official Style Guide Used by the Writers and Editors of the World's Most Authoritative Newspaper revised edition. Allan M. Siegal and William G. Connolly. New York: Times Books, 1999. ISBN 0812963881. Self-indexed.

General

The Elements of Style by Strunk and White: mostly literary style, United States
Fowler's Modern English Usage: later editions not written by Fowler, United Kingdom
Oxford Style Manual: The 2003 work combines The Oxford Guide to Style and The Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors with the latter contrating on common problems.
Plain Words by Sir Ernest Gowers: mostly literary style
Politics and the English Language, an essay by George Orwell dealing not only with conventional questions of style, but also with language distortion for political purposes.

Books

R.W. Burchfield; Fowler's Modern English Usage (Third edition); Clarendon Press; ISBN 0-19-861021-1 (revised 3rd edition, hardcover, 2004)
The King's English by Kingsley Amis
Troublesome Words by Bill Bryson
Janice Walker and Todd Taylor The Columbia Guide to Online Style; Columbia University Press ISBN 0231107897 (paperback, 1998) and ISBN 0231107889 (hardback, 1998)
The Chicago Manual of Style; University of Chicago Press; ISBN 0-226-10403-6 (15th edition, hardcover, 2003). Margaret Mahan wrote the preface, but is not credited as editor.
Usage and Abusage by Eric Partridge

External links

The Economist's style guide, United Kingdom
The Guardian's style guide
The Times's style guide, United Kingdom
The University of Memphis list of Style Manuals & Guides, United States
The Slot, by Bill Walsh; addresses contemporary issues such as nonstandard orthography in names, as in "Yahoo!" for the Internet portal; United States
Style Matters: What the AP Isn't Telling You, research on style guides by Beth Hughes, United States
Yale Style Manual (for web pages), United States