If you’re not a published writer, you may not be familiar with the concept of a style guide. But you can benefit from one even if your to-do lists and journal entries aren’t being read by a larger audience. A style guide is basically a glossary of rules to follow when writing. It establishes guidelines for how to write numbers, titles, addresses, punctuation, and anything else that could vary.
Even with a style guide, however, there are no hard and fast rules in the English language. There are multiple versions of style guides, and the rules for common situations can vary from guide to guide. None of the major style guides are exactly the same, which raises plenty of questions and leads to many a linguistic debate. No one seems to agree on what’s correct, but that’s only because each style guide applies to a different situation — and none of them are wrong.
How to Choose a Style Guide
Anyone can create their own guide, but there are a few style guides published by reputable sources that most publications follow. In some cases, editors may use one of the established guides as a starting point and write a few specialized rules unique to their purposes.
The Chicago Manual of Style is used widely for nonfiction writing. It includes the standard guidelines for punctuation and word usage, but its most valuable resource is the section on citation guidelines. It gives clear rules for formatting your citations and bibliography.
The Associated Press (AP) Stylebook is most commonly used by news organizations. However, it’s such a clear reference for rules regarding grammar, punctuation, capitalization, abbreviation, spelling, and numerals that it’s been adopted by many industries outside of the media.
The last major style guide is the Modern Language Association (MLA) Handbook. It contains the same categories of rules as the other guides but is most commonly used by students and for academic writing.
There are other specialized guides — such as the APA's guide, used mostly for science writing — but unless you're in a particular industry, the aforementioned three should cover most of your style guide needs.
Of course, if you flip through the various style guides, you'll find different rules for a variety of grammatical situations.
Serial Comma
The serial comma, also known as the Oxford comma, is the comma that comes between the second-to-last item in a list and a conjunction. For example, “blue, red, and yellow.” The comma after "red" is the serial comma, but some guides argue it shouldn’t be there at all.
Chicago Style includes the serial comma, while AP style has historically rejected it. The good thing is, some degree of its use comes down to personal preference. If you’re not writing a scholarly paper or an official document, you’re probably safe either way. Just pick a style and stick with it.
Em Dash
The Chicago and MLA style guides both say there should be no spaces between the em dash and the words beside it, while AP says there should be spaces.
Chicago and MLA: He burnt the bacon to a crisp—just how I like it.
AP: He burnt the bacon to a crisp — just how I like it.
Do these spaces change the meaning? Nope! But it’s a formatting rule that should remain consistent, no matter which guideline you follow.
Title Rules
Titles of works (books, songs, TV shows, poems, artwork, etc.) can be a little tricky. Some styles use italics, some capitalize differently, and sometimes it comes down to what type of document you’re titling.
Chicago and MLA are similar in their titling rules. They use lowercase letters for all prepositions, and they use italics for the entire title. APA and AP styles use quotation marks instead of italics, and capitalize prepositions longer than three words. For example:
Chicago and MLA: A Room with a View
AP and APA: “A Room With a View”
Apostrophes
It’s an old argument: Do you use an apostrophe and an "s" or just an apostrophe hanging on at the end of a word ending in "s"? Once again, both can be correct. It just depends on the style guide, and in some cases, whether the noun is plural.
For a singular noun ending in "s" (boss, octopus, mess), AP and Chicago use an apostrophe and an "s." APA and MLA use just the apostrophe. However, if the noun is plural and ends in "s" (bosses, octopuses, messes), all styles use an apostrophe only.
Numbers
Some styles say to spell out numbers. Others say to write the numeral itself. AP style says to spell out any number less than 10, while Chicago takes this rule all the way up to 100. MLA is stranger still, with a rule that says you should spell out any number if it can be written in one or two words. That means that one million should be written out, but 672 is written like so.
If all of these changing rules confuse you, don’t worry — you’re not alone. That’s why we have style books. And if you don’t want to look up someone else’s rules, just write your own!
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