Grammer a Week 10: Style Guides · 1:04am Apr 11th, 2015
Hey! Welcome to the tenth edition of Grammer a Week, the periodic blog program-thing where I would normally address a frequently broken grammar rule and tell you how to fix it. This week will be a little bit different; in celebration of ten weeks of pedantic grammar soapboxing, I'll talk about where I get most of these grammar rules from. Style guides!
One thing I consider essential as a writer is to have a good style guide on hand. A style guide will contain most or all of the grammar rules I've already covered as well as tips and guidelines on syntax, sentence structure, and overall writing style.
This should be a resource sitting beside your dictionary and thesaurus. Whenever you have a question about elegant phrasing, proper typesetting, or correct citation, a style guide is a good place to start. In that way, a style guide goes a lot farther than my blog posts ever could.
There are many, many good style guides out there to choose from, and most of them are good choices. You have to pay for some of them, but many resources are free. I've highlighted a few of the most helpful ones I know of:
CMOS—Chicago Manual of Style: This is my personal favorite, and it's the style guide I refer to most often whether it comes to MLP fanfics or academic papers. It's most suitable for professional publications.
You need a subscription to access this resource, but if you're a student (high school or post-secondary, current or former), you might have access through your school. I do! The Q&A (useful for really obscure and ambiguous grammar rules) is free for everyone, however.
MLA—Modern Language Association: This is the system I grew up on, and although I knew it mostly for its citation style, it contains a lot of other grammar and style guidelines as well. It's most suitable for writing in the humanities.
The site I linked isn't to the real MLA handbook—you'll need to buy the real book for that—but the OWL by Purdue University. It adheres to the MLA format, and it's a free resource.
The Elements of Style: This is possibly the quintessential guide to the American English language. The original edition of this book was written almost a hundred years ago, and some of the tips it gives are a little dated, but it is still a very good resource.
The link I gave above is for a physical copy of the guide. It's a thin volume, and it's really cheap, but a free copy of the first edition can be found here.
The Mc-Graw Hill Handbook: Okay, I really don't actually recommend this guide. The only reason I'm putting it here is because one of my professors helped write it. Although, if you need a resource for all matters of academic writings, this is a good choice.
And, perhaps the best style guide of all:
Fimfiction Writing Guide: Yup! Fimfiction has its own style guide. You've probably seen it linked a few times now. If I'm not mistaken, you're given a link to this guide when you sign up! Not to mention you always have access to it under the "FAQ" heading.
I think this style guide is kind of like the Terms and Conditions you see on a lot of sites: it's something you really should read in full, but few actually do. This site would contain many fewer poorly-written stories if that was the case.
Written by Ezn and edited over the years, it contains general grammar tips as well as sections for style, pacing, characterization, and plot development. It really is a very good resource for writing not just MLP fanfiction, but fiction in general. You have access to this guide at all times, and it's obviously free, so why not use it?
Thanks for sticking with me for this long. If you have any questions or comments, please post them below. I'm always open to suggestions for future Grammer a Week posts.
