Some Openly Accessible Style Manuals

Greetings again. I hope you’re doing well.

I just returned from a trip to the northeastern United States. This time of year, the leaves on many trees there have turned yellow, orange, or red. To see some photos of the autumn colors, I suggest searching Google using the terms “fall foliage photos”.

Before the trip, I gave graduate students and others in our Department of Soil and Crop Sciences a presentation on scientific writing. To help prepare, I looked at websites of some journals in this field. I was pleased to see that the American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America, and Soil Science Society of America have a style manual that all 3 use. I was especially pleased that this style manual is openly available online.

As noted in AuthorAID workshops, style manuals can provide helpful guidance for writing about research. Commonly, they both contain general guidance on writing (for example, regarding grammar and punctuation) and present standards for writing in a specific research area (such as chemistry, social science, or medicine). Some style manuals are expensive, though.

Some other style manuals, however, are openly available online. The website OnlineStylebooks.com includes links to nearly 70 style manuals. Some of these style manuals are for writing for the popular media, but many are for writing about specific research fields—for instance, anthropology, electrical engineering, or physics. Many of these style manuals can be accessed for free.

I encourage you to take a look.

Wishing you a good week— Barbara