Wikipedia:Identifying and using style guides: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 11:18, 12 July 2018

Revision as of 11:19, 12 July 2018

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=== House stylesheets ===

Innumerable organizations produce a "house style" guide for internal use. These are not reliable sources for English usage, and are just [[Wikipedia:No original research#Primary, secondary and tertiary sources|primary sources]] for what that entity's own subjective preferences isare for its internal memos and external marketing. Be careful when doing style research; it is easy to mistake something like the "University of Foobar Style Guide" for a work intended as public advice when it is really nothing but the opinion of the head of the school's marketing department for how to style university brochures and webpages for [[corporate identity]] purposes. Fairly often, you can even find conflicting style guides from different departments at the same legal entity.

A similar case is the submission requirements style sheets of individual journals and particular journal publishers. These reflect a single company or organization's viewpoint (or simply expediently made decisions), not an industry- or discipline-wide norm. They, too, are primary sources. They be useful for providing (attributed) quotable definitions of particular terms to compare with other definitions in articles on punctuation and other usage matters.