Buyer's Guide:
Style Manuals in U.S. English
Americans follow several
style manuals. To help you choose the
best one for your purpose, here is my buyer’s guide. I have no financial interest in any product,
and the information below comes from decades as a business writer, journal
editorial staffer, student, and professor.
The MLA
(Modern Language Association) Handbook presents the style used in most high schools and in university
humanities classes. Software
for generating MLA references is free on the Internet at many sites.
If you are
editing books or papers for journals in the social sciences, you might choose either The Chicago Manual of Style 16th edition
or the Publication Manual of the American
Psychological Association 6th edition (APA6; second printing or
later).
The Chicago Manual of Style is not an ideal standard for a business or a
university classroom. It includes two
distinct systems of source notation: numbered superscripts and (Author,
year). Further, it was written by and
for the staff of a large academic publishing house. If your venue is a classroom, corporation, or
association, you may have trouble finding answers to your style questions. That is, the manual is arranged and indexed
for editorial experts. You must know the
meanings of dagger, en-dash, run-in, and recto.
And you are paying for hundreds of pages of academic minutiae.
APA6 is friendlier to the teacher and student, but it is still written by editors who address published
authors and reviewers. It ignores the
logistics of term-paper submission.
For
example, despite an enlarged and well-illustrated chapter on figures and
tables, all of its examples of “table notes” presuppose that you reproduce tables
in their entirety from a published source—requiring copyright information and
permissions. That chapter shows no
examples of student-constructed tables that merely use some data from
sources. Such tables’ notes, I learn
from the APA’s wonderful Style Expert blog, should simply include the
citation(s) of your source(s), which you will of course expand, as usual, in
your reference list. I consult that blog
regularly.
There are style manuals for
every discipline: physics, chemistry,
history, biology, etc. And there is one for physicians: The American Medical Association (AMA) Manual of Style. But
when physicians and allied professionals teach, they normally require students
to follow APA style, because the APA manual is so much easier to use. The latest AMA Manual of Style (10th edition) weights 4.25 pounds
(1.928 kg) and covers over 1,000 pages.
I have a copy and I consult it when anyone asks. But, like The
Chicago Manual, it is a book for editors.
If you must follow AMA style, learn to use the free Zotero.org application. You can buy AMA software for $40, and there are free style sheets available.
You don’t
need either Chicago or APA6 if you are in business, because you rarely list sources. The most respected resource for U.S. business
English is The Gregg Reference Manual.
It has recently appeared in 9th,
10th, and 11th editions, with changes that seem to me
largely cosmetic and promotional. All of
those editions are good guides. This
book is complete and authoritative, and it is reasonably user friendly. When I face questions about grammar or
punctuation, I go to Gregg first.
Finally,
think of the needs of journalists on assignment. They
need quick answers to questions about nations, politics, peoples, customs, and
economics. That kind of information is
conveniently indexed in the 2011 and 2013 editions of The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law (AP).
For a browser of trivia like me, it is a
delight. And my friends in
public-relations departments use it constantly.
But it is not a good guide for email, proposals, or term papers. Its authors largely ignore both academe and
corporate etiquette, and it follows the punctuation rules of journalists.
There are literally dozens
of specialty style manuals. I have not even mentioned International Council of Medical Journal Editors ICMJE or Vancouver style (accepted by AMA and widely used in
Australia), Council of Biology Editors style
or the Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications.
If you contemplate buying a
style manual, I’d be happy to confer with you.
