Wikipedia:Identifying and using style guides: Difference between revisions
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== News style ==
Wikipedia is not written in [[news style]], as a matter of [[Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not#Wikipedia is not a newspaper|policy]]. Journalistic writing uses many conventions not appropriate for scholarly books (which is what an encyclopedia is, even if you move it online). Our MoS does derive a handful of things from journalism manuals, simply because they are not covered in academic ones; some examples include how to write about the transgendered, and which US cities are well-known enough to not need to be identified by state unless ambiguous. MoS does not follow journalistic punctuation, capitalization, or [[Headlinese|extreme brevity]] practices, and eschews [[Journalist|bombastic and unusual wording]].{{efn|name=titlepreps|One distinction between Wikipedia style and that of many news and academic publisher is the "[[Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Titles#Capital letters#5LETTER|five-letter rule]]": in titles of published works, capitalize a preposition of five letters or longer. Journalism style tends toward four or even three, while academic style most often lowercase all prepositions, even long ones like ''alongside''. It is one of the only ideas that Wikipedia's MoS has pulled from university textbook style guide, a "split the difference" approach that produces a happy medium for most readers and editors.<p>This is just one example. Another is that Wikipedia uses "[[Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Punctuation inside or outside|logical quotation]]", adopted from textual criticism, linguistics, philosophy, computer science, and other technical writing. Most academic and news writing follows the less precise typical punctation conventions of the country of publication, but consensus has decided this is [[Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/FAQ|not the best approach]] for a work that relies on quotation precision.</p>}} Our encyclopedia articles' [[Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Lead section|lead sections]] have little in common with journalistic "[[lede]]s". Even the [[Inverted pyramid (journalism)|inverted pyramid]] article structure of journalism is typically only found at Wikipedia in simple articles; for more complex topics, our pages are arranged more like an academic paper, with a number of subtopical sections, especially if [[Wikipedia:Summary style|summary style]] is employed.
In newswriting, the most influential manual, by both number of compliant publishers and number of news readers, is the ''[[Associated Press Stylebook]]'' (''AP''), used by the majority of the US press (though several papers, including ''The New York Times'', put out their own widely divergent style guides). The UK/Commonwealth press have no equivalent "monolithic" stylebook; each publisher makes up its own, or choses to follow one of the major papers' (''The Guardian'', ''The Times'', ''The Economist'', etc.; they're all pretty inconsistent with each other on many points; like ''NYT'' they make a point of it, as a branding mechanism). The ''UPI Stylebook'' and the house-style one for ''Reuters'' (both international newswires) diverge very little from ''AP''.
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== Topical academic style guides ==
Beyond the above, there are few style guides of note, other than for specific fields. Some major examples include the ''[[APA style|Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association]]'' (''APA''), the ''[[Modern Language Association Style Manual]]'' and its ''MLA Handbook'' abridged student edition (collectively called ''MLA'' style), ''[[AMA Manual of Style|American Medical Association Manual of Style]]'' (''AMA''), ''[[ACS style|American Chemical Society Style Guide]]'' (''ACS''), ''[[ASA style|American Sociological Association Style Guide]]'', etc. Most of these are American, and are primarily used for citation styles and the preparation and publishing of academic papers in journals. Students and other casual users (like Wikipedians) of their styles tend to buy citation style summary guides like ''[[A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations]]'' (often called ''Turabian'', after the original author, and containing also a summary of ''Chicago'' style), rather than the full, expensive manuals. When they offer general writing advice, aside from citations and field-specific stuff, the topical academic guides are mostly in line with ''Chicago'' and ''Scientific Style and Format'' (which is also a Chicago U. Pr. publication, and mostly normalized to ''Chicago'' orthography). There's also the ''[[Modern Humanities Research Association Style Guide]]'' (''MHRA''), which is British, but tiny, being mostly concerned with citations. Virtually nothing in the Wikipedia Manual of Style on general writing
There are specialized style guides for law, marketing, business, etc., but they don't have any real impact on general writing. Some of these have field-specific details drawn from them (especially in law) for MoS, but otherwise have no detectable influence on Wikipedia style. In particular, many of them are "punctuation-hostile", and like to drop hyphens, commas and other marks that don't seem absolutely necessary when professionals are communicating with other professionals in the same field, in compressed and highly [[Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Technical language|jargon-laden]] academic journal material.
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Aside from these, there are innumerable style [[monograph]]s (some notable examples include those of [[The Complete Plain Words|Gowers]], [[The Elements of Style|Strunk & White]], [[Grammar Girl|Fogarty]], [[The Sense of Style|Pinker]], and [[Eats, Shoots & Leaves|Truss]]). They range from overall writing advice to usage dictionaries, or some combination of these, and are of debated authority, often in conflict. The two best-accepted that take the form of usage dictionaries were already mentioned above: ''Fowler's'' (UK) and ''Garner's'' (US, though recently internationalized to an extent and actually published at Oxford).
There's also a never-ending stream of over-priced undergraduate textbooks that are just regurgitative [[Wikipedia:No original research#Primary, secondary and tertiary sources|tertiary sources]], though a handful are fairly well-regarded, like ''[[The Bedford Handbook]]'' and ''The Penguin Handbook''. These do not set style, but collect and average it from other sources (generally on a national basis, and sort of splitting the difference between academic, news, and business writing). Such works must be used with care for several reasons. They're typically not very current, and may insist on traditionalisms that have already slipped out of conventional usage. They are derivative, not authoritative, and may simply pick an arbitrary recommendation when more authoritative sources conflict. Thus, they are rarely of use in informing internal MoS discussions{{efn|name=titlepreps}}, other than when surveyed in the aggregate (i.e., "
Finally, there are {{em|grammars}} of English,{{efn|In this sense "a grammar" means a published study of grammar; a grammar book.}} which sometimes cover a few style matters, but they're [[Linguistic description|descriptive]] works – about everyday usage for learners or in serious [[linguistics]] terminology (depending on the publication in question) – not [[Prescriptive grammar|prescriptive]] style manuals. Our MoS generally does not deal with grammatical matters, strictly speaking. Wikipedia trusts that our editors already [[Wikipedia:Competence is required|have that under their belt]]. High-quality grammars of English are, however, very good sources for use in articles on the English language, and should take precedence over individual monographs and other prescriptive matter. For example, no amount of punditry against split infinitives and sentence-terminating prepositions can evade the well-studied linguistic fact that there are features of the language; their use or condemnation is primarily a matter of [[Register (sociolinguistics)|register of use]], not of "correctness".
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