In praise of style – Oxford, Chicago, or both
As language and writing evolve, style guides remain an essential tool in higher education and beyond, offering a framework for clarity and quality
If you write scholarly prose – in British, American or any other English variant – it pays to keep up with changes in the publishing world. In the digital age, English is evolving at an ever-increasing pace, so a general knowledge of current style conventions and how they came to be is both fascinating and practical. But how to keep up? Cue the style manual. The stalwarts are Oxford style in the UK and Chicago style in the US. But which to choose for your written scholarship? For matters of style, it’s best to be familiar with both.
In the US, Chicago style, named for The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) by the University of Chicago Press, has become synonymous with academic publishing. You may think of this as a citation style, but source citations and references, gruelingly infamous as they may be, are only a part of the picture. CMOS covers just about every aspect of academic writing, from style and usage to copyright. The same focus reigns true in the UK for Oxford style, as covered in New Hart’s Rules: The Oxford Style Guide.
Whether through coincidence or transatlantic publisher rivalry, the university presses published the first editions of their now-iconic style manuals a mere two years apart, at the beginning of the last century.
1906, Chicago, US
Chicago’s guide, like Oxford’s, first appeared in the 1890s as an in-house guide for proofreaders and others working at the press. First published in 1906, this Manual of Style (Chicago wouldn’t be added to the title until 1982) covered source citations, albeit in a petite section on footnotes that illustrated the very basics: how to style note reference numbers, what sequence to use when symbols stand in place of numbers, how to style numbers for references to volumes and pages, and how to use ibid. As in Hart’s Rules, the bulk of Chicago’s instruction was devoted to style, the words on the page.
Enter the typewriter
For centuries, style details mattered only to the printers who set the pages for published works from handwritten manuscripts. But just as style manuals were getting off the ground, the recently invented typewriter was becoming a fixture at universities and elsewhere. What had once been the exclusive realm of printers using printing presses was beginning to matter to authors.
The latest editions of Oxford’s and Chicago’s style manuals encode centuries of conventions for published prose. And though times have changed radically since 1900, most of the conventions date back farther than that.
Personal computers, the internet and handheld devices
The real revolution is in how things are published – and that’s where source citations enter the picture. Though any accurate and reasonably abbreviated description of another source can serve as a citation or reference, a podcast isn’t the same as a book and digital object identifiers aren’t in the same category as page numbers. The extensive citation coverage in CMOS now runs to more than 150 pages in print (almost 15 per cent of its 1,192 pages) or more than 300 numbered sections in The Chicago Manual of Style Online.
Which brings us to today, more than 500 years after the first book was printed at Oxford. If you’re in academia, you read and write scholarship. You are undoubtedly expected to adhere to a high standard set by the esteemed publication or university you are affiliated with. It doesn’t matter whether you’re reading or writing in British English, American English, Canadian English or another variety. Citations and style matter.
The fact that several centuries of English-language works remain intelligible today can be attributed to the generations of publishers who took pains to adhere to the conventions of their time. Start with a comprehensive style guide. CMOS and New Hart’s Rules differ in many details, but these small differences are often the most instructive. And when it comes time to cite your sources, Chicago is currently the most comprehensive and up to date, wherever you are in the world.
The Chicago Manual of Style is available in print and online. Remarkably affordable subscriptions to CMOS Online are available to individuals and academic libraries. To apply CMOS style to your manuscripts, try CMOS for PerfectIt proofreading software, which runs in Microsoft Word. For further reading, follow the CMOS Shop Talk blog.
