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
- Band names
- 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
