For a colleague who is a technical editor,
for a Christmas present, I sent a copy of the Wired Style Guide
at work to have it for a professional reference.
It's an editorial style guide developed by the editors of Wired Magazine.
They take a NEW approach to editing—for example,
suggesting to drop the hyphen in terms like email and ecommerce
and so on, while the more conservative approach assumes the audience
doesn’t understand the neologism and won’t get it.
Many of the people we work with are SURE
they know how language and spelling and grammatical constructions work
whereas what they are sure about is what Miss Smith taught them in seventh grade.
And while Ms. Smith herself might or might not have had it right,
language shifts with usage, and some of us are a long way from seventh grade.
I have half a dozen different style guides,
including a run of the last four editions of Chicago Manual of Style.
(Here is the Chicago Manual of Style Online, free trial use.)
“Chicago,” or “The Orange Bible” as professionals call it,
is the style guide I find the most useful, and
the one we used for the University of California Press style,
with our own emendations.
Nota Bene--Chicago has altered its style in every edition.
It’s sobering to show these multiple style guides to students
and haul the books out when colleagues get ideological about style.
It shows how many approaches there are to editorial style.
Some colleagues agitate for APA as a “house style”—to be
REQUIRED of all the graduate students.
Why? Surely for consistency for our graduate Center and for grading,
but I also suspect because their own grad school departments did so.
(The Communication Department at last university I taught in also required APA.)
I do recommend APA for our geeks
even though I don’t think it’s the best guide in the world,
because APA is the normative SOCIAL SCIENCES style,
and Communication as a field is a social science.
But I DO NOT LIKE the authoritarian approach of THOU SHALT use suchandsuch
a style in a graduate school.
As in Chicago’s guidelines, you can make any blessed
style you want as long as it’s reasonable and consistently followed. In my own doctoral
dissertation for a leading USA graduate school, I used a combination of MLA and APA. Nobody complained.
The authoritarian approach is not conducive to developing masters, just automatons—
someone who excels by following orders and conforming to norms.
So, happy styles to you, until we meet again
(lyrics from the classic “Song of the Editorial Cowboy”).