Wikipedia:Identifying and using style guides: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 02:58, 7 July 2018

Revision as of 03:07, 7 July 2018

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== Other style guides ==

Various other types of works are sometimes referred to as style guides.

=== Law, business, marketing, and ther professions ===

There are specialized style guides for law,legal marketingwriting, business letters and memos, effective marketing, 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.

=== Monographs and how-to materials ===

Aside from these, thereThere 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 are also many how-to guides, usually intended for a specific genre (writing better mystery fiction, etc.). MoS is not concerned with these, and takes a consistent writing approach to all subjects, [[Wikipedia:Writing about fiction|including fiction]].

=== Textbooks ===

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., "Because ''Bedford'' says so" isn't a valid rationale). They are also weak sources for use as citations in our actual articles; while our [[WP:No original research]] policy considers them {{em|reliable}} as a general class (at the university level and higher), they are not {{em|high-quality}} sources, and (being tertiary) they cannot be used for any claims that involve [[WP:AEIS|anaysis, evaluation, interpretation, or synthesis]] – these require secondary sources.

They are also weak sources for use as citations in our actual articles; while our [[WP:No original research]] policy considers them {{em|reliable}} as a general class (at the university level and higher), they are not {{em|high-quality}} sources, and (being tertiary) they cannot be used for any claims that involve [[WP:AEIS|anaysis, evaluation, interpretation, or synthesis]] – these require secondary sources. Textbooks below the university/collegiate level are not reliable sources; this also goes for remedial textbooks, and books written for children, and works written for the [[Simple English (disambiguation)|simplified English]] market.

=== Grammars ===
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".

Basic learner materials are not reliable sources for the same reason that secondary-school text books are not.

== Tone about tone – dictating what's "right" is wrong ==