Writing style guides

[Centrist Simon Steele]

Hi everyone,

I teach first year composition courses at a nearby university, and I always try to make the instruction relevant to my students. For example, instead of teaching MLA citation (because of my background in the humanities), I also teach APA. I try to communicate that each of the these styles are more than just a citation method. They having philosophical underpinnings.

MLA should be used for writing with a more theoretical point of view. If you are analyzing a text (a text being anything that can be analyzed--a movie, graffiti, art, music, books, articles, conversations, etc.) then MLA might be the best choice. It allows you to focus on the author and what was said. In fact, the author plays an important role throughout MLA writing. A paper could be about Buffy's character arc in the Buffy series, or Joss Wedon's writing of the character of Buffy from the film vs. the television show. But the "author" remains (often) at the forefront.

APA technically is best for research we've done. We'll have lit reviews, sure, but the structure of APA is about methodology, communicating how you built the research, selected the participants, etc., and then analyzing the results of your research. 

More can be said about both of these, but these are examples. So what about Chicago Style? I am beginning to dive into this, but I have no experience with it. For those of you familiar with it, what would you say an underlying philosophy of this style is that differentiates from the other two. Or how would you modify some of the points about the other two to better accommodate a description of Chicago Style? I really try to communicate to students this isn't just about citing differently, but joining a conversation in the right discipline.

[Datepalm]

I can't stand Chicago, tbh, either reading or especially writing - that participation in the conversation means I want the who and the when right there in the flow of the text. MLA not having an in-line year thus also renders it impractical (for my mind, particularly impractical for a review, if anything - the dating is a crucial part). So I basically default to APA or sometimes Harvard.

[Centrist Simon Steele]

1 hour ago, Datepalm said:

I can't stand Chicago, tbh, either reading or especially writing - that participation in the conversation means I want the who and the when right there in the flow of the text. MLA not having an in-line year thus also renders it impractical (for my mind, particularly impractical for a review, if anything - the dating is a crucial part). So I basically default to APA or sometimes Harvard.

Agreed. APA is the most useful for many reasons, but I feel like I need to teach all (including Harvard!) as my students will go into disciplines that may use them. 

[Datepalm]

To be even more honest, I was never systematically taught any of this that I can remember. Cite your work, use a single style per document, follow a particular one if there are instructions to do so, learn to use a citation manager, it will make your life easier. That was pretty much it.

[HexMachina]

6 hours ago, Datepalm said:

To be even more honest, I was never systematically taught any of this that I can remember. Cite your work, use a single style per document, follow a particular one if there are instructions to do so, learn to use a citation manager, it will make your life easier. That was pretty much it.

Same here. We were pointed to the online guide in our first introductory lecture at undergrad with the guidance “Familiarise yourself with it. It’s important.”

Thats was OSCOLA

[Matrim Fox Cauthon]

My academic field mostly writes in Chicago/Turabian Style (at least in North America). The German-speaking sphere has its own style guides. We also have a supplemental style guide for our field (i.e., The Society of Biblical Literature Handbook of Style) for dealing with our own set of jargon, abbreviations, transliterations, citations, and even fonts for writing in non-Latin scripts (e.g., Hebrew, Greek, etc.), etc. It follows Chicago unless otherwise noted. Styles may vary from publisher to publisher, but Chicago is generally regarded as the standard, at least until the publisher says otherwise.

I just loathe any Endnotes.
 

[Mlle. Zabzie]

37 minutes ago, Matrim Fox Cauthon said:

My academic field mostly writes in Chicago/Turabian Style (at least in North America). The German-speaking sphere has its own style guides. We also have a supplemental style guide for our field (i.e., The Society of Biblical Literature Handbook of Style) for dealing with our own set of jargon, abbreviations, transliterations, citations, and even fonts for writing in non-Latin scripts (e.g., Hebrew, Greek, etc.), etc. It follows Chicago unless otherwise noted. Styles may vary from publisher to publisher, but Chicago is generally regarded as the standard, at least until the publisher says otherwise.

I just loathe any Endnotes.
 

OMG this for anything that is article-length.  Book-length, I'm divided.  For anything narrative, end notes.  For a treatise, footnotes.  In both cases, the author should eschew, where possible, substantive footnotes/endnotes.

Lawyers are stuck pretty much with The Blue Book, which I kind of loathe, but them's the breaks.  The tax bar generally modifies strict Blue Book (e.g., I don't cite the Internal Revenue Code as 26 U.S.C., but rather just as defined term "the Code" (short of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, as amended).  And, thought I try to be consistent in how I do it, I do not abbreviate as ruthlessly as suggested by the Blue Book.

[Centrist Simon Steele]

I had read as I prepped over the summer that MLA's (framers?) created MLA because of the issue with footnotes in Chicago. I don't know if this is true or not, but what do you see as being the necessity of footnoting in Chicago? For example, in APA you use author's last name and date because more recent dates are super important in research. Do you see footnoting having a reason behind it?

Either way, I feel like Chicago may have just been the first major style guide, but I want to check up on this.

As to other responses about my students--I think it is important for them to know why they are writing in a specific format, why there are specific formats, etc. (instead of thinking they are jumping through hoops merely to please me!). 

[Matrim Fox Cauthon]

43 minutes ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

OMG this for anything that is article-length.  Book-length, I'm divided.  For anything narrative, end notes.  For a treatise, footnotes.  In both cases, the author should eschew, where possible, substantive footnotes/endnotes.

I understand that footnotes can look unseemly for publishers wanting something that makes for more casual reading, particularly for lay people, but my eyes are trained now to look for footnotes and then jumping back seemlessly into reading. Endnotes disrupt that reading flow.

20 minutes ago, Simon Steele said:

I had read as I prepped over the summer that MLA's (framers?) created MLA because of the issue with footnotes in Chicago. I don't know if this is true or not, but what do you see as being the necessity of footnoting in Chicago? For example, in APA you use author's last name and date because more recent dates are super important in research. Do you see footnoting having a reason behind it?

Either way, I feel like Chicago may have just been the first major style guide, but I want to check up on this.

Footnoting is super helpful when there are (1) long lists of relevant works being referrenced, and (2) when the author wants to add side comments about the references or additional background information that would otherwise disrupt the main text. So I may footnote a comment about scholarly disagreements on an issue, and then say, "Hey for scholars who hold traditional Position A, see List A of sources; for scholars who hold more reasonably nuanced Position B, see List B of sources; for scholars who hold completely idiotic, fringe position C (but who for some reason keep getting cited), see List C of sources." This would be incredibly disruptive to read as part of a main text.

[Seli]

In the last few years I actually used citations those were mostly dictated by the style for the journal I was aiming at (Endnote was useful). But generally they boiled down to numerical references in the text with the actual references in foot- or endnote sections. And it might be exposure but it is a completely sensible system to me. Short unique references ( often superscript notes) don't distract from the text and names and dates can still be used selectively for emphasis. It is shaped by a culture (chemistry) where authors publish many works a year, and we tend to reference data more often than ideas or arguments.

[Centrist Simon Steele]

13 hours ago, Matrim Fox Cauthon said:

I understand that footnotes can look unseemly for publishers wanting something that makes for more casual reading, particularly for lay people, but my eyes are trained now to look for footnotes and then jumping back seemlessly into reading. Endnotes disrupt that reading flow.

Footnoting is super helpful when there are (1) long lists of relevant works being referrenced, and (2) when the author wants to add side comments about the references or additional background information that would otherwise disrupt the main text. So I may footnote a comment about scholarly disagreements on an issue, and then say, "Hey for scholars who hold traditional Position A, see List A of sources; for scholars who hold more reasonably nuanced Position B, see List B of sources; for scholars who hold completely idiotic, fringe position C (but who for some reason keep getting cited), see List C of sources." This would be incredibly disruptive to read as part of a main text.

Agreed--I didn't mean to put footnoting down. I just remember reading somewhere that MLA wanted less footnotes. I've found footnotes to be both great and disrupting (House of Leaves...). 

[Matrim Fox Cauthon]

3 hours ago, Simon Steele said:

Agreed--I didn't mean to put footnoting down. I just remember reading somewhere that MLA wanted less footnotes. I've found footnotes to be both great and disrupting (House of Leaves...). 

I wrote mostly in MLA for high school and undergrad. Yeah, footnootes are not as much of a thing for MLA.