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Style guides
Saturday, July 5th, 2003 11:35 pmThinking about what reference format I should use for my coursebook led me on a long journey through the labyrinth of style guides - APA, MLA, Chicago, you name it. It was depressing. Just about every academic publication has its own preferences for layout and referencing, most of which seem to have been created solely for the purpose of eliminating potential writers who can't be bothered with such minutiae. I remember submitting a paper for inclusion in a book published by John Benjamin, who required a bibliography in APA format, with the exception that instead of initials, they wanted the author's full first name. This meant that I had to search for the first names of all the authors in my bibliography, which was not an easy task, since a lot of them were merely one of many authors in a compilation volume. Apparently the reason was that the publishers thought it would be good if people reading the bibliography realised how many authors were female. You all know that Zhang Meili and Emine Özgün are women, don't you?
Two things irritate me especially about these official style guides. The first is parenthetical citation where, instead of putting the boring stuff in a footnote, you have to write something like "Neo has frequently been compared to Christ (Jones, 1999:12; Smith, 1999; Krause, 2000:5; Vlacovicz, 2001:32; Gumperz et al., 2002:208)". Did you really want to read all that? Citation in parentheses is a hangover from the days when authors wrote on a manual typewriter and footnotes were hard to type. Now we have computers. Even cruddy word processors like MS Word can do footnotes, and the LaTeX-using elite can even enter citation references and rely on their awesome technology to turn them into a citation in whatever format they have specified.
My other layout gripe is with the way so many style guides ask people to format their documents. Having woken up to the fact that the manual typewriter has gone the way of the manual calculator (yes, children, we used to do calculations by turning a handle on a machine) the APA and MLA try to ensure that a document produced on a computer still looks as much like a typed manuscript as possible. They recommend a fixed-width font like Courier to give that reassuringly ugly look (claiming, with no justification, that it makes documents more readable) and demand that blockquotes be indented on the left, but not on the right. The only reason I can think of for this typographical abomination is that typewriters indent easily on the left but not on the right.
Having looked at half a dozen style guides, if I had to choose one of the commonly-used ones, I think I'd go for the Chicago Manual of Style. They prefer footnotes, they recommend using a normal font (e.g. Times) and their advice on grammar points is reasonable (e.g. you can split an infinitive if it looks better that way). I also like the fact that in correspondence, their style advisors are referred to as "the style godesses".
Two things irritate me especially about these official style guides. The first is parenthetical citation where, instead of putting the boring stuff in a footnote, you have to write something like "Neo has frequently been compared to Christ (Jones, 1999:12; Smith, 1999; Krause, 2000:5; Vlacovicz, 2001:32; Gumperz et al., 2002:208)". Did you really want to read all that? Citation in parentheses is a hangover from the days when authors wrote on a manual typewriter and footnotes were hard to type. Now we have computers. Even cruddy word processors like MS Word can do footnotes, and the LaTeX-using elite can even enter citation references and rely on their awesome technology to turn them into a citation in whatever format they have specified.
My other layout gripe is with the way so many style guides ask people to format their documents. Having woken up to the fact that the manual typewriter has gone the way of the manual calculator (yes, children, we used to do calculations by turning a handle on a machine) the APA and MLA try to ensure that a document produced on a computer still looks as much like a typed manuscript as possible. They recommend a fixed-width font like Courier to give that reassuringly ugly look (claiming, with no justification, that it makes documents more readable) and demand that blockquotes be indented on the left, but not on the right. The only reason I can think of for this typographical abomination is that typewriters indent easily on the left but not on the right.
Having looked at half a dozen style guides, if I had to choose one of the commonly-used ones, I think I'd go for the Chicago Manual of Style. They prefer footnotes, they recommend using a normal font (e.g. Times) and their advice on grammar points is reasonable (e.g. you can split an infinitive if it looks better that way). I also like the fact that in correspondence, their style advisors are referred to as "the style godesses".
