Nancy Tuten 3 December 2017 Style Manuals While there are some hard-and-fast grammar rules (subjects must agree in number with their verbs, for example), a large percentage of what people regard as “rules” are, in fact, matters of style. Discussions on this website frequently refer to the Chicago Manual of Style rather than to other well-known style manuals because Chicago is widely considered the most authoritative and widely used style manual in the American publishing industry. But before you decide which style manual is best for your organization, here are some points to consider: First, many style manuals tend to be discipline specific. Many people who practice law, for example, use the Texas Law Review Manual of Usage, Style, and Editing.
Greggs Office Reference Manual
Harvard’s The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation is the bible of the legal professional with regard to form and style for legal citations. People trained in the humanities use the manual published by the Modern Language Association (MLA). Professionals in the social sciences commonly use the stylebook of the American Psychological Association (APA). Almost universally, journalists follow the guidelines of the Associated Press (AP) style manual. Because each of these manuals of style—and the many others not named here—is designed to accommodate a specific kind of writing, they do not always agree on particular matters.
The Associated Press, for example, discourages the use of the, while Texas, Chicago, MLA and most other grammar and mechanics guides advocate its usage. Here’s another example of a difference: Texas advises that shortened references to proper nouns (such as when we refer to “South Carolina” in a document and later refer to it as “the State”) be capitalized, while Chicago recommends that such words begin with lowercase letters. Despite the fact that we here at Get It Write usually use The MLA Style Manual for our own academic publications, we suggest the use of Chicago, due to its established place in American publishing as a whole, for business and organizations that have adopted neither a customized nor a discipline-specific manual of style. Barnes and Noble editors that “for more than one hundred years The Chicago Manual of Style has remained the definitive guide for anyone who works with words.” Although many textbooks on business and technical writing exist, and a few mass-market style manuals for such writing have been published, such as the Gregg Reference Manual, no single book has emerged as the “quintessential” manual of style for the field of business per se. Most of these books do speak with authority about matters of style in business writing, but often they do not agree with one another.
Thus, rather than arbitrarily choose a business-oriented guide as our primary source of information, Get It Write has here again elected to adhere to the principles set forth in Chicago. For guidance about matters not addressed in Chicago (such as the format for business letters, memos, and business E-mail), we recommend because it works well with our preferred lexicon,. What matters most, in any case, is for an organization to choose or design a style manual and insist that all its employees adhere to that style for consistency’s sake. We all know how important it is to be consistent in matters of style in a single document; an organization, corporation, or agency should demonstrate the same consistency if it is to project a professional and polished image to the public. Many organizations design their own style manuals in order to address the kinds of writing-related issues that are particular to them.
Such a document is referred to as an in-house style sheet or manual. Newly hired employees will bring with them a set of expectations about how business writing should be handled. An in-house style manual provides newcomers (and old timers!) with clear guidelines regarding the principles of style that should govern writing in their workplace. ( about how Get It Write can help you create an for your business or organization.) Copyright 2001 Get It Write. Revised 2018.