3 ms·

Chicago is my style guide of choice, although I have an older edition. The only real alternative is the AP style guide, which I don’t favor because I’m not a jo

Chicago is my style guide of choice, although I have an older edition. The only real alternative is the AP style guide, which I don’t favor because I’m not a journalist. There’s a lot of focus on citations in this review, but citations are only a small part of the guide. I’m usually looking up things like capitalization, punctuation, or quotation rules that I half-remember.

mistrial9 2y ago
What do you think of the St. Martin's Handbook ?
- klodolph 2y ago
  That’s a different category of book, I think. I haven’t used St. Martin’s, but it looks most similar to Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace, which I recommend.
  - mistrial9 2y ago
    the preface to the third edition St Martin's Handbook says that the primary driving motivation for the book is "solving writing problems that students really have." The book includes six chapters on research writing, specifically. CMS on the other hand I had heard of as a standard for newspapers and big journalism, as well as research writing (5000 rules of footnotes, etc). Sections in St Martin's include: - Attention to good writing, not just to surface correctness. - Systematic attention to reading. - Practical guidelines for recognizing, understanding and revising the most common errors. - A look at language in everyday use. - Six chapters on research writing. - Attention to the needs of basic writers.
    - klodolph 2y ago
      Yes, that sounds like a different category from Chicago. Same category as Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace. I flipped open Chicago to an arbitrary page, and it was describing how to refer to decades—whether you say ’90s or nineties or 1990s. It had rules for whether to use an apostrophe, whether to capitalize, and whether to spell out or use numerals.
ghaff 2y ago
AP and Chicago are mostly quite similar although AP differs in a few specific things, e.g. no Oxford comma. Where I used to work, we generally used Chicago, Merriam-Webster, and IBM but we would go with AP for things like press releases because journalists generally use AP and we wanted to make it painless for them to cut and paste press releases, public company blogs, and the like.

mistrial9 2y ago

What do you think of the St. Martin's Handbook ?

klodolph 2y ago
That’s a different category of book, I think. I haven’t used St. Martin’s, but it looks most similar to Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace, which I recommend.
- mistrial9 2y ago
  the preface to the third edition St Martin's Handbook says that the primary driving motivation for the book is "solving writing problems that students really have." The book includes six chapters on research writing, specifically. CMS on the other hand I had heard of as a standard for newspapers and big journalism, as well as research writing (5000 rules of footnotes, etc). Sections in St Martin's include: - Attention to good writing, not just to surface correctness. - Systematic attention to reading. - Practical guidelines for recognizing, understanding and revising the most common errors. - A look at language in everyday use. - Six chapters on research writing. - Attention to the needs of basic writers.
  - klodolph 2y ago
    Yes, that sounds like a different category from Chicago. Same category as Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace. I flipped open Chicago to an arbitrary page, and it was describing how to refer to decades—whether you say ’90s or nineties or 1990s. It had rules for whether to use an apostrophe, whether to capitalize, and whether to spell out or use numerals.

ghaff 2y ago

AP and Chicago are mostly quite similar although AP differs in a few specific things, e.g. no Oxford comma. Where I used to work, we generally used Chicago, Merriam-Webster, and IBM but we would go with AP for things like press releases because journalists generally use AP and we wanted to make it painless for them to cut and paste press releases, public company blogs, and the like.