Are style manuals still relevant?
To answer the question posed in the title, one must know at least a bit about style manuals (also known as style guides or stylebooks) and what they have to do with writing research papers—because these books tell you nothing about how to be well dressed or about latest styles in fine clothes, shoes, or jewellery. The word ‘style’ in the context of these books has a narrow and specific meaning and refers to the appearance of words and other forms of text as seen on the printed page or on the screen of a mobile phone, tab, laptop, desktop, etc. Time of the day serves as a good example: is four o’clock in the afternoon written as 4 p.m. or 4 pm or 4 PM or . . .? Answers to such queries are to be found in style guides, which are a compilation of hundreds or thousands of such answers.
Why researchers should use style manuals
“But I am a researcher, not a writer; why do I need to bother with such trivia?”, I hear you asking. So here is another example: would you write ‘honeybee’ or ‘honey bee’ (one word or two)? Merriam-Webster unabridged online dictionary uses honeybee as the headword and offers honey bee as a variant; Oxford, Cambridge, Collins, and Longman – four major UK dictionaries – all agree on the one-word version; however, entomologists[1] maintain that it must be ‘honey bee’ because the insect is indeed a bee—and stings like one! Yet, ‘dragonfly’ is one word because the insect is not a true fly at all; after all, you would never write ‘butter fly’, would you? Correct capitalization is yet another example: mg means milligram(s) – symbols have no plurals – whereas Mg means megagrams or million grams (the same as t, or a tonne). Similarly, the name and the symbol for a dominant trait generally begins with a capital letter, whereas that for a recessive trait begins with a lowercase letter[2]. Thus, as a researcher, you would do well to get to know the relevant style guide in your field. The latest, to be published early next year[3], is The CSE Manual: Scientific Style and Format for Authors, Editors, and Publishers (9th edition). This manual is a comprehensive one (about 800 pages) and has separate chapters for different domains such as analytical chemistry, astronomy, and taxonomy and nomenclature.
Another reason why researchers should use style manuals is that increasingly publishers are doing away with in-house copyediting and expect authors to submit manuscripts – especially final versions of accepted papers – that are compliant with the specified style manuals. Authors are therefore well advised to do so because, after all, it is their names that are associated with the published papers.
Subject-specific style manuals and general-purpose style manuals
Once you appreciate the purpose of style manuals, you will see why we need both general-purpose and subject-specific sources. Take the earlier example about time of the day, which is not tied to a specific subject. Dates offer a related example: 15 August 2023 or August 15, 2023 or 15/8/2023 or 8/15/2023 or . . .? Then there are matters related to punctuation as used in ordinary text, names of countries, and formats for citations and references. All such matters are dealt with in general-purpose manuals, the better known among these being The Chicago Manual of Style (now in its 17th edition) and the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (now in its 7th edition).
Subject-specific manuals are as numerous as the fields they cover. Even the US Directorate of Intelligence has its Style Manual & Writers Guide for Intelligence Publications, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, its CDC Style Guide. Among the more widely known are the AMA Manual of Style (11th edition), which describes the conventions recommended by the American Medical Association, and the American Chemical Society’s ACS Guide to Scholarly Communication[4], available only in electronic form.
And style manuals go back a long way. Oxford University Press published its first style guide, Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press, Oxford, in 1893; its latest incarnation is the New Oxford Style Manual, published in 2016, widely used in publications that follow UK English.
Reconciling conflicting recommendations between style manuals
It is well to remember that many of the recommendations in style manuals are arbitrary: after all, their main purpose is to ensure consistency by recommending one out of multiple possibilities. And different style manuals may make different choices. For example, in expressing temperature, do you insert a space between the value and the unit (39°C or 39 °C)? Whereas most manuals recommend a space, the AMA Manual of Style recommended setting the expression without the space until its 10th edition. In such cases, it is best to look up recent issues of the journal to which you intend to submit your manuscript and follow the journal’s practice.
Style manuals in the digital age
The ‘electronic-only’ option brings us to the question of the relevance of style manuals in the digital age. Probably, what the American Chemical Society decided is the way to go, and the Australian Manual of Style[5] has followed suit. After all, in many ways style manuals serve the same function as spelling checkers, and PerfectIt[6], a tool developed by Intelligent Editing, demonstrates how it can be done; the tool even works with styles of your choice, and compatibility with the Chicago Manual is optional but built into the tool. Writing research papers has its share of sheer drudgery, the minutiae of formatting references in the required style being a prime example. However, software tools have relieved researchers of that drudgery, and similar tools that automatically ensure compliance with the chosen style manual are round the corner.
Maybe, as I mentioned elsewhere[7], “The question is whether style guides in their current form have a place in the world of sound bites and progressively shorter attention spans, of 140-character tweets, and of repurposed texts.”
But style manuals have a larger purpose too, a purpose that is often overlooked given the focus on the minutiae. We are in the danger of not seeing the wood for the trees. Style manuals exist for clear communication and encourage authors to care for their readers. Style manuals also exist for the intermediaries – copyeditors, typesetters, and proofreaders – between the written word and the published word, and if authors are familiar with style manuals, they are well-placed to help the intermediaries and, ultimately, the readers. I hope the emerging tools, including ChatGPT and large language models, in the guise of helping writers, do not make them blind to the needs of the reader. That concern for the reader will never cease to be relevant—nor will style manuals.
References
[1] Kirk W D J. 2022. Is it Honey Bee or Honeybee? Bumble Bee or Bumblebee? Who decides the common names of bees? Bee World 99:2, 38–39
10.1080/0005772X.2021.1982315
[2] Daintith J and Martin E (eds). 2009. New Oxford Dictionary for Scientific Writers and Editors, p.158. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 452 pp.
[3] https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo202437296.html
[4] https://pubs.acs.org/page/acsguide
[5] https://stylemanual.com.au/
[6] https://intelligentediting.com/
[6] Joshi Y. 2013. Style guides that refuse to go away. Learned Publishing 26: 133–134
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