A style guide comparing Associated Press style and Chicago style for editors, writers, teachers, students, word nerds, and anyone else who gives a dollar sign, ampersand, exclamation point, and pound sign about style.
Funny Posts
Compounds Ending with a Preposition or Adverb: Open, Hyphenated, or Solid?
It seems as if I’m always rifling through my reference books to check whether a compound is open, hyphenated, or solid in a particular style.
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Apostrophe-S vs. Apostrophe: Forming Possessives of Words Ending in S (or an S Sound)
I’m going to focus on the difference between how The Associated Press Stylebook and The Chicago Manual of Style handle possessives for words ending in s or an s sound.
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Slashes: Uses and Restrictions
Misunderstood. Abused. Ignored.
No, not me. Well, maybe that, too, but I’m referring to the beleaguered slash . . .
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Styling Text Messages in Fiction
Your protagonist’s phone vibrates. It’s a text from her best friend, but how? He died exactly one year ago in a car crash. The words come into focus.
Wait a second. How should text messages be styled in a manuscript?
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Beyond Kerning: How to Proofread Design
If you love catching a zero in place of a capital O, a curly quote in place of a prime, or two single quote marks in place of a double, you can hone your eagle eye by learning to spot flaws in design.
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Crafting Citations through Principles, Not Rules: MLA Style, Eighth Edition
As a student of the humanities, I worked with Modern Language Association (MLA) style long before I became aware of the other styles. So it’s big news to me and generations of scholars that the eighth edition of the MLA Handbook, published in April, breaks from a rule-based format to one that focuses on the principles for crafting useful citations.
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