Manuals & Guides

Style guides generally give guidance on language usage. Some style guides consider or focus on elements of graphic design, such as typography and white space. Website style guides often focus on visual or technical aspects. more...

Home
Building & Hardware
Dining & Bar
Electrical & Solar
Food & Wine
Heating, Cooling & Air
Home Security
Kitchen
Major Appliances
Outdoor Power Equipment
Chainsaws
Chippers, Shredders &...
Edgers
Engines, Multi-Purpose
Hedge Trimmers
Lawn Mowers
Leaf Blowers & Vacuums
Manuals & Guides
Other Outdoor Power...
Pressure Washers
Snow Blowers
String Trimmers
Tillers
Plumbing & Fixtures
Tools
Vacuum Cleaners &...
Wholesale Lots
Window Treatments

A publishing company's or periodical's house style is the collection of conventions set out in its internal style guide, or manual of style.

"Style" in this context therefore does not refer to the writer's voice.

Overview

Traditionally, a style guide (often called a style manual or stylebook) dictates what form of language should be used. These style guides are principally used by academia and publishers.

In such works, style can have two meanings:

Publication conventions for markup style, such as whether book and movie titles should be written in italics; expression of dates and numbers; how references should be cited.; Literary considerations of prose style, such as best usage, common errors in grammar, punctuation and spelling; and suggestions for precision, fairness and the most forceful expression of ideas.;

Some modern style guides are designed for use by the general public. These tend to focus on language over presentation.

Style guides don’t directly address writers’ individual style, or “voice,” although writers sometimes say style guides are too restrictive.

Like language itself, many style guides change with the times, to varying degrees. For example, the Associated Press stylebook is updated every year.

Academia and publishing

Style guides used by publishers set out rules for language use, such as for spelling, italics and punctuation. A major purpose of these style guides is consistency. They are rulebooks for writers to ensure language is used consistently. Authors are often asked or required to use a style guide in preparing their work for publication. Copy editors are charged with enforcing the style.

Style guides used by universities are particularly rigorous in their preferred style for citing sources. Their use is required of scholars submitting research articles to academic journals.

General interest

Other style guides have as their audience the general public. Some of these adopt a similar approach to style guides for publishing houses and newspapers.

Others, such as Fowler's Modern English Usage (3rd edition) report how language is used in practice in a given area, outline how phrases, punctuation and grammar are actually used. Since they are for the general public, they cannot require one form of a word or phrase to be preferred over another, though they may make recommendations, and sometimes strong recommendations at that. These guides can be used by anyone interested in writing in a standard form of a language.

Read more at Wikipedia.org