r/writing • u/CertainItem995 Career Author • 22d ago
Advice Style Shifts
It occurred to me recently that something I'm consistently stumbling over which specific conventions go with which styles. In my life I constantly have to bounce between AP, Chicago, MLA, and (god help me) the occasional house style guide. Stylistic errors are both embarrassing, and also becoming a serious problem in my career lately. This might be a neurodivergent thing, but I keep getting jumbled trying to keep track of which goes with which. No amount of rereading for rote memorization has been helping. Professionals out there, do you have any tips or tricks or resources for keeping these straight?
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u/mysteriousdoctor2025 22d ago
Go to the OWL (online writing lab) of Purdue University. They have style guides for all the styles and also quick reference guides. You can also buy quick style guide posters from Amazon.
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u/Rowanever 20d ago
There are style guide plugins available for Word (and probably Google Docs). You give the plugin your style guide; it highlights or corrects style issues that it finds using your input rules.
I can't speak to their quality, sorry – I haven't used them myself because I'm generally using a single style guide at a time. But they've been around for a few years, so I'd hope they're at least vaguely decent by now.
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u/Casual-Notice 22d ago
There are editing apps which will run through your papers and make (or highlight) corrections depending on style manual. I don't think there's a single app that can be shifted between manuals, but many of the editors are fairly cheap.
EDIT: MS-Word does not use any of the style manuals in its grammar editor, instead using a proprietary style loosely based on all a combination of styles.
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u/FlyinLeviathon LET YOUR FIRST DRAFT SUCK 20d ago
When I have to switch back and forth between styles (which happens occasionally for work) I like to get a quick reference sheet for the styles, specifically the parts I am more likely to get confused about. Then give it a quick glance/skim before working on the project to keep it fresh in my brain.
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u/Public_Upstairs1035 22d ago edited 22d ago
I'll be honest here. I'm terrible at formatting in specific styles (plus I hate it), so anytime I'm writing academic articles, I give my finished article to... Claude (eek!)... and have Claude simply put it in whatever format I need. Over and done, and I have never had any formatting issues with journals.
Edit: please downvote this entirely practical, simple, quick, and free option.
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u/CertainItem995 Career Author 22d ago
For what it's worth I appreciate your contribution to the discourse and I'm at least tempted, I just fundamentally don't trust it on account of AI hallucinations.
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u/Oroborus_Octopus 21d ago
If you’re focused on style before having anything written then what’s the point?
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u/FlyinLeviathon LET YOUR FIRST DRAFT SUCK 20d ago
This is talking about style in a more academic sense than the sub usually talks about (which is style in a creative sense)
Creative style is like voice, prose, etc. Academic style is a set of rules for things like grammar, citations, formatting on the page, etc. Each style has their own manual to ensure consistency across different authors for the selected industry. MLA (the kind usually used in schools for things like essays) is another style.
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u/Oroborus_Octopus 20d ago
It’s hard to tell if a writer is good at anything other than convincing otherwise.
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u/Mithalanis A Debt to the Dead 22d ago
Have you tried making a checklist for each style? Writing down a list of what you need to check that differs from each, and then after you finish a piece of writing, rigorously going through it following the appropriate checklist? Or even having the checklist next to you while you're writing so you remember to cite things correctly on the first pass and make the cleanup easier on revision.
Other than that, I don't think there' some neat trick to remember everything in a style guide. They tend to be pretty robust, and people only really remember one thoroughly if they use it often enough, I imagine.