Chicago Manual of Style, AP Stylebook, and More: A Primer

Whether it's called a style book, style guide, manual, or handbook, the purpose of such books is to provide a set of standards for the writing, formatting and design of documents. Any style guide lays out best practices in usage, language composition, typography, visual composition, and more. Here are the Big 5 of writing style books:

The Chicago Manual of Style (shortened to CMOS)

The Associated Press Stylebook (AP)

The Modern Language Association Handbook (MLA)

The American Psychological Association Manual (APA)

A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations by Kate Turabian, commonly referred to as Turabian (based on CMOS)

The style guide you should use depends on the kind of writing you do and the intended audience. Please do not blame me, as I had nothing to do with these decisions. But these are the recommended style guides for different types of writing:

• Fiction and (most) nonfiction: CMOS

• Journalism and website content: AP

• Academic writing, primarily literature and humanities: MLA

• Social sciences (including psychology, sociology, education, and politics) and often engineering and some forms of business writing: APA

• Research papers, theses, and dissertations: Turabian (The title gave it away, didn’t it?)

Chicago Manual of Style Reigns Supreme

The CMOS and the AP are the two most commonly used writing style guides in the United States. But the CMOS is, by far, the most-used style guide of them all, the standard for fiction and nonfiction book publishing, excluding academic works. Adding more clout to the CMOS’s share of the style guide market, Turabian, for students and researchers, is based on Chicago style. I know this because it says so right on the cover.

As an editor, I own the most current editions of each of these style guides in paperback format, except the CMOS. If you’ve ever seen it, it’s a monster. As of this writing, the current edition is the 17th and it weighs in at 3.7 lbs. (1146 pages). Since I’ve been known to edit and write in all kinds of places, from restaurants to coffee houses to my car, I subscribe to the Chicago Manual of Style Online version and it is worth it.

Do Writers Need Style Guides?

You might be thinking, “Yeah, but I’m a writer, not an editor like you. These darn style guides are for you to use, not me.” And I’m fine with that, because the more editing I have to do to clean up your work and bring it up to acceptable writing standards, the more money I get to charge you. That’s harsh, but true. There’s no shame in actually wanting to be the best writer you can possibly be! Learning the rules of good grammar, punctuation, capitalization, spelling, and so on is better for your career in every way.

When I do an editing job, I tell my client which style guide I intend to use based on my perception of the genre of the piece. I include the style guide by name in my contract.

If you are familiar with the major stylistic differences of the top two or three guides, there won’t be any surprises in my edits. (Well, maybe one or two.) Here are a few differences that might surprise you:

The em Dash

The use of em dashes: AP style places a space before and after each em; Chicago does not.

AP: Streaming services — like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu — are watched daily by most people.

Chicago: Streaming services—like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu—are watched daily by most people.

Titles

AP puts titles of works like books and movies in quotations marks, Chicago uses italics.

AP: “A Wrinkle in Time”

Chicago: A Wrinkle in Time

The Infamous Oxford Comma

There are scores of stylistic differences between the AP and the CMOS style guides, but this, for me, is the biggie: the Oxford comma. The Oxford (or serial) comma is the term that refers to a comma that separates the penultimate (next to last) item in a list of 3 or more items from the final item introduced by and or or. AP style does not use the Oxford comma, Chicago style does. I can only shake my head in wonder.

AP: She ate ham, sweet potatoes and corn.

Chicago: She ate ham, sweet potatoes, and corn.

This example doesn’t present a problem. But wait….

Janine sat in the lobby with her husband, a lawyer and a photographer.

Janine sat in the lobby with her husband, a lawyer, and a photographer.

The use of the Oxford comma in the second sentence changes the meaning. Is Janine in the lobby with her husband who is a lawyer and photographer? It could be interpreted that way if we’re using AP style. Or is she in the lobby with her husband and two other people who are a lawyer and a photographer, respectively? There are three people with Janine if we’re using the CMOS.

I love the Oxford comma. I have always felt that it eliminates any confusion as to the exact way to read and interpret a list of items. If I am your editor and the appropriate style guide for your work is the Chicago Manual of Style, I will be adding in those Oxford commas till the cows come home!

To learn more about Chicago Manual of Style, click here.

To learn more about AP Stylebook, click here.

To learn more about MLA Handbook, click here.

To learn more about APA Manual, click here.

To learn more about Turabian, click here.

Writing Sensory Description, Part 2

So in my last blog post, I discussed how, often, writers neglect sensory descriptive language in their work. Keeping in mind that we have five senses--sight, smell, taste, hearing, and touch--many writers fail to incorporate all or even most of these in their writing. If you remember, I wrote this for you:

Steven entered the downtown bistro where he was to meet Elizabeth. He nudged his way to the front of the group of patrons waiting to be seated and scanned the room for her.

“Can I help you, sir?” the hostess says. At that moment, Steven spots Elizabeth.

“I’m meeting someone and I see her now,” Steven says and walks toward the table, smiling at Elizabeth as he approaches.

“I hope you haven’t been waiting long,” he begins.

Elizabeth smiles warmly. “No, I’ve only been here about five minutes. It’s great to see you.”

I intentionally scripted this scene with no sensory description. I included nothing that gives the reader a genuine sense of entering a downtown eatery. Since Steven has to work his way to the front of the patrons waiting to be seated, you can infer that this is a busy place. What senses could come into play in a busy restaurant scene? What about smells? Can he pick out specific dishes or ingredients? What might he see when he scans the room? Employees? Patrons? Doing what? Is it noisy? What does he hear?

I have played with this scene to punch it up. I cheated a little by adding a short introductory description of Steven's approach to the bistro. Here's what I came up with:

Steven hunched his shoulders against the chilly wind as he approached Trish’s Treatery, a popular downtown bistro where he was to meet Elizabeth. Upon entering, he steeled himself against nasty looks and began to wiggle his way to the front of the dense flock of business men and women waiting to be seated. He emerged as though a butterfly from a cocoon, to view the bustling sight before him.

A no-nonsense hostess approached him, scowling. "Can I help you, sir?" Plates and glasses clinked, patrons talked and laughed, servers announced today's specials, and somewhere beneath it all, Michael Buble' sang "Haven't Met You Yet."

Steven leaned toward her and raised his voice to be heard above the din. "I'm meeting someone who's already been seated." Satisfied with this explanation, she nodded and returned to her reservation desk.

Servers in their pale burgundy uniforms hustled from kitchen to table and back again at an athletic pace. The air teemed with tantalizing smells Steven knew well; he could identify Trish’s signature risotto with andouille sausage, the portobello mushrooms with crab stuffing, and the grilled grouper with roasted garlic aioli. His mouth watered as a margherita pizza raced past carried by a 5-foot-tall server named Jenna who beamed with what Steven could only interpret as pride.

Scanning the convivial scene, he recognized Elizabeth’s silk charmeuse scarf before he even saw her face. Purchased in Paris when she was on a business trip with her law firm, Elizabeth wore the vibrant, spring-blossom-themed accessory year-round. Steven picked his way through the room, past the tables and diners, sidestepping as an elegant woman pushed back her chair to retrieve her clutch from the burgundy carpet beneath her seat.

As he approached her table, Elizabeth raised her eyes to him and smiled, flooding him with a warmth he had not felt since they’d separated three months earlier. The mere sight of those green eyes caused his hands to tremble.

OK. Love it? Hate It? Too much? Yes, maybe. At least I hope you agree it offers more to grab onto than the first version. I bombarded the senses--chilly wind, the crush of the patrons, the obstacle course of the dining room, voices, music, clothing colors and texture, and the mouth-watering entrees.

Enliven your writing by stimulating the readers' senses. Make them feel as though they are in each scene with the characters, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching what they are seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching. A short story or novel should play like a movie of the mind, don't you agree?

Writing Sensory Description, Part 1

Most requests for my editing services have been for novels and short stories, and to critique personal essays. The personal essay, which is a subcategory of memoir, is more akin to fiction that autobiography, but that’s a discussion (or disagreement) for another day.

Each writer’s style is as unique as a snowflake. But one piece of advice I find myself giving often is the ever-popular, never-to-be-forgotten “show, don’t tell.” As hackneyed as it might sound, this is excellent advice and an aspect of fictional writing that still gets swallowed in a sea of dialogue.

Authors remember to address the big elements of storytelling: characters have names, jobs, and life roles like wife or father, boss or best friend. They speak to other characters and move from place to place. They do things and things happen to them.

But often, scenes scream for greater narrative depth—descriptions of lighting and shadow, smells or odors, noises, textures, and temperature.

The irony of this “show, don’t tell” thing is, it subconsciously places the burden on visual (sight) description. Humans have five glorious senses that, under ideal circumstances, work together to give us a 3-D impression of our world.

Sight is the sense writers use most heavily because it’s the easiest. How people look, how things look, how places look—stories get bogged down with lots of looking and seeing. But this is not how the human senses operate in real life.

Consider a scene that takes place in a restaurant. A character enters, scans the room, spots the character he is looking for, and walks to the table and sits. That scene might be written like this:

Steven entered the downtown bistro where he was to meet Elizabeth. He nudged his way to the front of the group of patrons waiting to be seated and scanned the room for her.

“Can I help you, sir?” the hostess says. At that moment, Steven spots Elizabeth.

“I’m meeting someone and I see her now,” Steven says and walks toward the table, smiling at Elizabeth as he approaches. “I hope you haven’t been waiting long,” he begins.

Elizabeth smiles warmly. “No, I’ve only been here about five minutes. It’s great to see you.”

Now, I just wrote this and it is intentionally barren of descriptive words. How could I punch this up to bring this scene to life? What would draw readers into the scene? What’s missing?

In Part 2, I’ll focus on using each of the five senses to create greater narrative depth. I will rewrite the scene implementing all five senses.

You Can Help Me

Please share your ideas for adding sensory description to this bistro scene. Besides sight, what can we do with sound, touch, taste, and smell? Write a comment to help add color, noise, odor or fragrance, texture and so on to wake this scene up.