Nuts & Bolts
Public Relations

Four Style Guides and a Grammar Book Answer Your Writing Questions

By Tom Milani, WIW Member

As a technical editor, style guides are the tools of my trade. However, anyone who writes and cares about language will find them enlightening. Here are descriptions of the four style manuals and one grammar book I use most frequently on the job.

The Chicago Manual of Style (14th ed., University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 1993) is the standard for editors in the publishing industry. The three parts of the manual describe its scope: bookmaking, style and production, and printing. It is most valuable to me as a guide for preparing references. Chicago clearly presents two styles of references: the documentary note, or humanities style, in which the bibliographic information appears in footnotes or endnotes, and the author-date style, in which the source appears in parentheses and the full citation appears in a reference list.

If Chicago is the bible for editors in the publishing industry, the Government Printing Office Style Manual (GPO: Washington, 1984) is the standard for anyone working on government documents. It includes details on preparing the records of testimony given before Congress, legal citations and the like. I find GPO most useful, however, in the chapters on numerals, compounding and capitalization. Although GPO guidelines may not be appropriate for every publication, they are models of clarity as well as being quite comprehensive. For instance, the table of prefixes and their compounds (closed, hyphenated or open) is more comprehensive than that found in Chicago.

With comprehensive instructions for hyphenating chemical names and rules for naming chemical compounds, the ACS Style Guide (American Chemical Society: Washington, D.C., 1986) is clearly geared toward the scientific editor. It nevertheless is a solid reference for the more general user. ACS has an excellent discussion on word usage; for example, the guide's rule for whether "data" should be considered singular or plural is the clearest I've read. If the data are considered individually, the guide says, use the plural verb; otherwise, use the singular. Suggestions for good writing are similarly concise. The guide does have one quirk: it uses the logical style of punctuation; that is, commas and periods appear outside of quotation marks unless they are part of the material quoted.

While GPO, Chicago and ACS are geared toward specialists, the New York Public Library Writer's Guide to Style and Usage (HarperCollins: New York, 1994) is the manual for everyone else. That doesn't mean it doesn't offer specialized knowledge—the guide has the best section on setting mathematics into type I've seen. However, it concentrates on issues facing most editors today. For instance, the guide explains that using "American" to describe residents of the United States is less than ideal in a publication with an audience in other countries whose residents consider themselves Americans.

Finally, we come to the reference with the best title, Patricia O'Connor's Woe Is I: The Grammarphobe's Guide to Better English in Plain English (Putnam's: New York, 1996). Woe Is I is primarily a grammar and usage book; it doesn't deal with the larger issues of manuscript preparation or references. Still, I use it daily because, of all the manuals, its index is the best for quickly finding answers to questions of word usage. Is it "further" or "farther"? When is "due to" correct? Woe Is I lists these and many other problem words in its index. And while Woe doesn't have the breadth of the other works, it counterbalances this shortcoming with its wit.

So there you have it—five books that can make any editor's or writer's life a little easier. If they don't answer all your questions, they will at least give you enough guidance and information to find your way. And sometimes, that's enough.

This article originally appeared in the January 2000 issue of The Independent Writer.