Style guide tips for blogging

There are so many different style guides for writing. But, keeping things consistent can provide a better experience for your reader. This quick reference is a growing collection of my own notes on the topic.

Commonly used style guides

• Associated Press (AP Style) – the penultimate for journalists and news writing
• Chicago Manual of Style (CMS) – often used in book publishing for fiction and non-fiction works
• Modern Language Association (MLA) – used almost exclusively in the academic world for scholarly papers and such
• American Psychological Association (APA) – a standard used in social sciences including psychology, sociology, education and politics. APA is also used in some cases for engineering and business work.
• Turabian – named for author Kate Turabian — it focuses on research work and is also used in academia

Additional style guides

• American Chemical Society (ACS)
• American Medical Association (AMA)
• American Sociological Association (ASA)
• Bluebook – used in the legal profession
• Council of Science Editors Manual (CSE)
• Harvard Style – also known as Author-Date style, mainly used for citation guidelines
• National Library of Medicine (NLM)
• Screenplays – rules for scene headings, action lines, characters, dialog and parentheticals

AP Style tips for blogging

I have tended to use AP style for most of my blogging, here are some notes and tips I’ve needed to reference on an ongoing basis.

• Headlines
  • Capitalize the first word and proper nouns
  • Numerals for all numbers
  • Single quotes for quotation marks
  • No periods for US, UK, UN
  • No periods for states with  two capital letters: NY, NH, NM, NC, SC, ND, SD, RI, DC
  • All other states  use periods: Mich., Mont., Conn.
• Magazine names
  • Capitalize the initial letters of the magazine name
  • Do not use quotation marks
  • The word “magazine” is only capitalized if it is part of the formal title of a publication (e.g., Food Network Magazine)
• Capitalization of titles
  • Quotation marks around the titles
  • Capitalize principal words and prepositions/conjunctions of four or more letters
  • Capitalize an article (a, an, the) and words of fewer than four letters if it is the first or last word in the title
  • No quotations for titles of software, such as Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Windows
  • Examples
    • Albums “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”
    • Books: “Of Mice and Men”
    • Movies “Saving Private Ryan”
    • Songs: “Stairway to Heaven”
    • Television shows “The Tonight Show”
    • Videogames: “Super Mario Bros.”
• Names
  • Band names
    • Not italicized, no quotation marks
  • People’s names
    • Only use last names on the second reference, unless the individual requests otherwise
    • For names of individuals 15 or younger, use first name unless the story is about a crime or celebrity/athlete
• Punctuation and quotation marks
  • Periods and commas always go within quotation marks
  • Dashes, semicolons, questions marks and exclamation points:
    • go within quotation marks when they apply to the quoted matter
    • go outside the quotation marks when applying to the entire sentence