The Duchess Manual of Style

My brother-in-law and I have been conversing back and forth via email all yesterday afternoon about style manuals. Apparently he had to know about four different style manuals for a final he had later in the day. He only knew about APA and MLA, so I got to tell him about the wonderful world of the Chicago Manual of Style. As a fourth example, I threw in Turabian, even though it’s basically built off of Chicago. However, it’s important enough that the manual gets its own name. If it didn’t, it would be a manual called The Rip-off Manual of the Chicago Manual of Style. I wouldn’t like to be that manual. Talk about a lack of identity.

So let’s review some moderately-important style manuals.

APA : American Psychological Association. Used for psychology, education, and other social sciences. As Ambrosia once pointed out, the APA Style Guide is of the devil.

MLA : Modern Language Association. Used for literature, arts, and humanities

AMA : American Medical Association. Used for medicine, health, and biological sciences

Turabian : Designed for college students to use with all subjects. This manual is basically pointless, seeing that it is so-closely-related to Chicago, as I already mentioned.

Chicago : Used with all subjects in the "real world" by books, magazines, newspapers, and other non-scholarly publications. Chicago is the only true style guide.

I should have my own manual of style. It would be called the Duchess Manual of Style. So good. Actually, I wrote the Board Policy Manual, so I could get into this stuff. Technical writing, I mean.