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 16^th edition  or the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association 6^th 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 (10^th 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 9^th, 10^th, and 11^th 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.