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branch of Corporate Identity design and Branding .]]

Publishing house style guides outline standards for design and writing for a specific publication or organization. Some focus on Graphic Design , covering such topics as typography and white space. Web Site style guides focus on a publication's visual and technical aspects, prose style, best usage, grammar, punctuation, spelling, and fairness.

Some modern style guides are for the general public, tending to focus on language over visual presentation. Although style guides do not directly address a writer's voice, some writers think them too restrictive. Like language, many style guides change with time; for example, the stylebook of the Associated Press is updated yearly.


ACADEMIA AND PUBLISHING

Publishers' style guides establish house rules for language usages, such as spelling, italics, and punctuation; consistency is the major purpose of these style guides. They are rulebooks for Writer s, ensuring consistent language. Authors are asked or required to use a style guide in preparing their work for publication; Copy Editors are charged with enforcing the publishing house's style.

University style guides are particularly rigorous in the preferred source citation style; their use is required of scholars submitting research articles to academic journals.


GENERAL INTEREST


The general public is the audience for some style guides; these may adopt the approaches of publishing houses and newspapers. Others, such as '' Fowler's Modern English Usage (3rd edition)'', report how language is practiced in a given area and 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 instead of another, though they may make strong recommendations; anyone interested in writing in a standard form of language may use such style guides.

To have an idea of how this approach is used, consider what Robert Burchfield , and observers, have stated about ''Fowler's''. On the one hand, Burchfield states, "Linguistic correctness is perhaps the dominant theme of this book", but he also states, "I believe that 'stark preachments' belong to an earlier age of comment on English usage". Indeed, John Updike, writing in ''The New Yorker'' magazine, said: "To Burchfield, the English language is a battlefield upon which he functions as a non-combatant observer."


SPECIALIZED GUIDES


Some organizations other than the aforementioned ones produce style guides for either internal or external use. For example, communications and public relations departments of business and nonprofit organizations have style guides for their publications (newsletters, news releases, Web sites), and organizations advocating for social minorities establish what they believe to be fair and correct language treatment of their audiences.


Graphic design style guides


Many publications (notably newspapers) use Graphic Design style guides to demonstrate the preferred Layout and Formatting of a published page. They often are extremely detailed in specifying, for example, which Fonts and colours to use. Such guides allow a large design team to produce visually consistent work for the organization.


EXAMPLES OF STYLE GUIDES


International standards


Several basic style guides for technical and scientific communication have been defined by international Standards Organization s. These are often used as elements of and refined in more specialized style guides that are specific to a subject, region or organization. Some examples are:

  • ISO 8 — Presentation of Periodical s

  • ISO 18 — Contents lists of periodicals

  • ISO 31Quantities & Unit s

  • ISO 214 — Abstracts for publication & documentation

  • ISO 215 — Presentation of contributions to periodicals & other serials

  • ISO 690 — Bibliographic references — Content, form & structure

  • ISO 832 — Bibliographic references — Abbreviations of typical words





Canada


Newspapers
  • ''. ISBN 0920009387.

  • '' The Globe And Mail Style Book '': Originally created to help writers and editors at the Globe and Mail present clear, accurate, and concise stories. ISBN 0771056850



United Kingdom


General


Journalism



United States


In the United States, the two most widely-used style guides are the in names, as in " Yahoo! " for the Internet portal. As of 2000, Walsh's popular The Curmudgeon's Stylebook is no longer on-line.

General

Books and general interest

Web sites


Newspapers

Government

Law
  • '''', published by the Harvard Law Review Association in conjunction with the Columbia Law Review , the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and The Yale Law Journal.




Academic


For a summary and comparison of academic style guides, see Style Manuals and Writing Guides by the CSULA University Library.


Computer industry (software and hardware)

  • '' Read Me First! A Style Guide For The Computer Industry ''; Sun Technical Publications/Prentice Hall; ISBN 0-13-142899-3 (2nd edition, 2003). Provides comprehensive guidelines for documenting computer products, from writing about web sites to legal guidelines, from writing for an international audience, to developing a documentation department.

  • '' Microsoft Manual Of Style For Technical Publications ''; Microsoft Press; ISBN 0-7356-1746-5 (3rd Bk&CD edition, 2003). Provides a style standard for technical documentation, including: use of terminology; conventions, procedure, and design treatments; and punctuation and grammar usage.



Graphic design style guides



SEE ALSO







EXTERNAL LINKS


Style guides for American English

Style guide for Australian English

Style guides for British English


Style guide for Canadian English

Style guides for international organizations

Style guide for medical journal articles

Miscellaneous