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MHRA Style Guide

July 9, 2009 by Roy Johnson

pocket academic writing style guide for humanities

The key to this style guide is in its subtitle: ‘Notes for Authors, Editors, and Writers of Theses’. It has been produced by the Modern Humanities Research Association as a manual of advice and procedures for people preparing texts for publication. The MHRA Style Guide assembles a set of conventions to help users through the minutiae of the scholarly editing and presentation of texts.

MHRA Style Guide If you are a student, a researcher, or a writer, the net result is a brief and very usable guide. One of its principal advantages over other guides is its brevity: it only includes the essentials, and everything is easy to find. And yet it covers everything you would normally require for academic writing or formal publication – from spelling, abbreviations, and punctuation through to the thorny issue of bibliographic referencing, which is what often drives students into fits of nail-biting frenzy.

It’s all very succinct, and yet manages to pack in the presentation of foreign languages, citations from articles, journals, and newspapers, and even a nod towards the Author-Date (or Harvard) system of referencing.

The latest edition has been expanded to cover preparing texts for electronic publication and there are sections on indexing and writing a thesis or a dissertation. There’s a glossary, sections on book reviews and correcting proofs, and a good index.

I first came across this book when it was chosen by the Open University as a set text for some of its postgraduate courses. Getting students to follow the conventions is still hard work, but it’s a lot easier than it used to be.

What I like most about the book is that it gives you the impression that you’re just about to publish an important piece of work. Since it’s also amazingly cheap, it’s worth buying as a confidence-booster alone.

© Roy Johnson 2008

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MHRA Style Guide: Notes for Authors, Editors, and Writers of Theses, London: Modern Humanities Research Association, new second edition 2008, pp.95, ISBN: 0947623620


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Style – ten lessons in clarity and grace

July 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

how to refine your writing style

This is a twenty year old book already in its sixth edition, and the author admits that it’s still ‘evolving’, which is a good sign that serious thought is going into its composition. Style ten lessons in clarity and grace is based on a course Joseph Williams teaches at the University of Chicago. His approach is based on two principles – that ‘it’s good to write clearly, and anyone can’ – and the second part of the proposition is what he’s teaching here. His approach is to draw attention to the finer issues of clarity in prose, and to show how language can be used with subtelty to effect it.

Style ten lessons in clarity and grace His ten seperate chapters deal with each of these issues in turn, and his own prose style is engaging and friendly – which both proves his point and shows that he knows what he is talking about. He starts with a brief and amusing guide to bad prose and what creates it, and he ends with the most celebrated advice on creating effective prose – that good writing is about ‘rewriting’. His general advice is that improvement can be made – if you go slowly. So what then are his ten ‘lessons’?

  1. Write with readers in mind
  2. Write clearly
  3. Write concretely
  4. Write in an active mode
  5. Put the subject at start of sentence
  6. Put rhetoric at end of sentence
  7. Edit, edit, edit; and cut, cut, cut
  8. Get the verb in the main clause
  9. Create structure
  10. Write ethically

It’s pitched at a fairly sophisticated level, suitable for intermediate to advanced users. Williams assumes that readers know the basics of what is right and wrong, but want to improve in matters of clarity and elegance. He makes an interesting and useful distinction between three types of correctness – and offers different levels of response to them.

There are are exercises in each chapter with suggested answers, which I think makes this a text which might be more popular with tutors than with the students for whom it was presumably written. You’ve got to put up with a lot of grappling with ‘nominalizations’, ‘resumptive modifiers’, and elimination of the passive voice, as well as the same examples worked over and over until they’re right.

There’s a particularly good chapter on deleting redundant expressions, writing more concisely, and eliminating ‘metadiscourse’ [signposting or ‘writing about writing’]. He gives one example where a fifty word statement is edited down to a sentence of six. His advice includes one point I write on something like fifty percent of all student essays: ‘Put the subject at the start of the sentence, and follow it as soon as possible with the verb’.

Towards the end of the book he tries to ‘teach the unteachable’ – elegance and ‘good style’. This section requires quite a sophisticated level of literary experience, and strangely enough he ends on punctuation – but pitched at quite an advanced level.

This isn’t a book for beginners. It’s for people who want to improve their existing writing skills, who want to rid themselves of officialese and cloudy abstraction and garbled syntax so as to produce writing which is clear and efficient. If you follow his advice, read carefully what he’s got to say, and complete the exercises, I think you’ll find it money well spent.

© Roy Johnson 2000

Style ten lessons in clarity and grace   Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Joseph Williams, Style: ten lessons in clarity and grace, New York: Addison Wesley, (6th edn) 1999, pp.309, ISBN: 0321024087


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The Global English Style Guide

July 2, 2009 by Roy Johnson

writing clear documentation for a global market

Many people who do not speak English as a first language struggle to understand English texts. Human translation is expensive. Machine translation (MT) frequently does not work. Global English offers a solution to these three related problems. Many good style guides exist. Why do technical writers need another guide to writing style? But unlike many other guides, The Global English Style Guide covers grammatical structures, not only particular terms.

The Global English Style Guide The book has more than 200 pages of text (plus 4 appendices) that give detailed explanations of both good practice and bad practice. John Kohl writes clearly, and he explains the reasons for the guidelines. His guidelines are based on practical work at SAS Institute, where he works as a technical author. Most technical writers know some of the guidelines already. For example, restrict the use of the passive voice; use language literally; and simplify the writing style. However, many guidelines may be new. For instance, until I read the book, I used all these sentence structures:

  • However, you can put an adverb in many locations.
  • You can, however, put an adverb in many locations.
  • You can put an adverb in many locations, however.

Now, I put an adverb at the start of a sentence, because in that location, the adverb helps to show the reader the logical connection with the previous sentence.

Both of the following sentences are grammatically correct:

  • Set up the system.
  • Set the system up.

Now, as far as possible, I always use the first structure, and keep the parts of a phrasal verb together. Keeping the parts of the verb together increases consistency, improves machine translation, and helps non-native speakers who do not know the particular verb.

A full chapter and an appendix show how to improve readability and translatability by using syntactic cues. A syntactic cue is a part of language that helps a reader to identify parts of speech and to analyse the structure of a sentence. Sometimes, syntactic cues are optional, but excluding them can cause ambiguity. Kohl gave a humorous example. The grammatically correct sentence, “Do not dip your bread or roll in your soup” has two possible meanings:

  1. Do not dip your bread or your roll in your soup.
  2. Do not dip your bread in your soup, and do not roll in your soup.

If readers are aware of the second interpretation, they know that it is incorrect. However, with technical texts, if a writer does not include optional syntactic cues, a reader’s interpretation may be incorrect.

With Global English, a writer can use all grammatical structures and all terms, unless the guidelines prohibit the grammar or the term. Additionally, the primary rule of Global English is, ‘do not make any change that will sound unnatural to native speakers of English’.

An alternative method for writing clear text is to use a controlled language. With a controlled language, a writer can use only grammar and terms that are permitted. Despite the different methods, many of the Global English guidelines agree with controlled language guidelines.

The subtitle of the book refers to writing documentation. However, most of the guidelines apply to copywriting as much as to technical writing. All writers who want to reach a global audience, to decrease translation costs, or to make their texts as clear as possible will benefit highly from this book.

Review by Mike Unwalla © 2008

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John R, Kohl, The Global English style guide: writing clear, translatable documentation for a global market. Cary, NC: SAS Institute Inc. 2008, ISBN 9781599946573.


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Writing Guides

November 16, 2009 by Roy Johnson

best-selling writing style guides

Writing Guides Doing your Research Project - book jacketDoing Your Research Project: A Guide for First-Time Researchers in Education and Social Science is a best-selling UK guide which covers planning and record-keeping, interviewing, reviewing ‘the literature’, questionnaires, and writing the final report. Even if you are studying a subject other than education or social science, this is a wonderfully helpful guide on organising your ideas and your writing at research level. It’s a model of clarity and good sense. Now in its third edition – and deservedly so. Highly recommended.

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Writing GuidesWriting your Doctoral Dissertation: Invisible Rules for Success is a US guide to writing at post-graduate level which uses practical examples, is strong on planning, and offers advice on negotiating the process of research – from making an application to submitting a dissertation. It’s also good on the issue of selecting a research topic and developing it into a feasible project. One of the features which has made this a popular choice is that it offers tips from former students on the problems they have faced in doing research – and how they have overcome them.

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Writing GuidesIf you have any serious intention of preparing text for publication, then Copy-Editing: The Cambridge Handbook for Editors, Authors and Publishers is your encyclopedia on typography, style, and presentation. It has become the classic UK guide and major source of reference for all aspects of editing and text-presentation, covering every possible bibliographic detail. It also covers a wide range of subjects – from languages to mathematics and music – as well as offering tips on copyright and preparing text for electronic publication.

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Writing GuidesWriting at University: a guide for students is a popular UK guide to understanding questions, planning assignments, reading and note-taking, and developing arguments. It puts a lot of emphasis on the process which leads up to the act of writing, and tries to show you how to develop more confidence. Different types of writing are discussed, as well as the important skill of matching your writing to the conventions of the discipline you are studying. The approach is like that of a sympathetic counsellor.

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Writing GuidesThe Classic Guide to Better Writing is more-or-less what its title suggests. It’s a best-selling US guide with emphasis on how to generate, plan, and structure your ideas. It also covers basic grammar, good style, and common mistakes. The approach is step-by-step explanations on each topic, plenty of good advice on how to avoid common mistakes, and tips on how to gain a reader’s attention. Suitable for all types of writing, it well deserves its good reputation.

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fowlerIf you need just one book which will answer all your questions on writing – from punctuation to publication – then this is it. The Little, Brown Handbook is an encyclopaedic US guide to all aspects of writing. It includes vocabulary, punctuation, grammar, style, document design, MLA conventions, editing, bibliography, and the Internet. All topics are profusely illustrated and cross-indexed, and some of the longer entries are virtually short essays. It also has self-assessment exercises so that you can check that you have understood the contents of each chapter. The Swiss army penknife of writing guides. Highly recommended.

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New Hart's Rules - Click for details at AmazonHart’s Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press Oxford This is a UK classic guide to the finer points of editing and print preparation, spelling and typography. It was first written as the style guide for OUP, but quickly established a reputation well beyond. There’s no hand-holding here. Everything is pared to the bone. the centre of the book deals with ‘difficult’ and irregular spellings. A masterpiece of compression, it is now in its thirty-ninth edition. This is one for professionals rather than student writers.

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Oxford Writers Dictionary - book jacketThe Oxford Dictionary for Writers & Editors . This is a specialist dictionary for writers, journalists, and text-editors. Unlike most dictionaries, it does not offer explanations of the words meanings. It deals with problematic English and foreign words, offering correct spellings and consistent usage in the OUP house style. By concentrating on difficult cases, it saves you a lot of time. The latest edition also includes American spellings. Strongly recommended.

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The Elements of Style - Click for details at AmazonThe Elements of Style. This is an old favourite – a ‘bare bones’ guidance manual which cuts out everything except the essential answers to the most common writing problems. It covers the elements of good usage, how to write clearly, commonly misued words and expressions, and advice on good style. The emergency first-aid kit of writing guides. It’s very popular, not least because it’s amazingly cheap. Suitable for beginners. There’s an online version available if you do a search – but the cost of a printed version will pay dividends.

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A Manual for Term Papers, Dissertations, and ThesesA Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations. This is a modern American classic guidance manual for academic writing. It covers everything from abbreviations and numbers to referencing and page layout. It also includes sections showing how to lay out tables and statistics; lots on bibliographic referencing; and how to deal with public and government documents. The latest edition also includes advice on word-processing.

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Style: Ten LessonsStyle: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace. This is a popular guide – particularly amongst creative writing enthusiasts. It offers advice for improving your writing – by putting its emphasis on editing for clarity, creating structure, and keeping the audience in mind. These lessons are useful for all types of writing however. It has plenty of illustrative examples and exercises, an appendix with advice on punctuation, and a good glossary. Recommended.

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Successful Writing for Qualitative ResearchersSuccessful Writing for Qualitative Researchers. This is one for specialist academic writing at post-graduate level. It covers all the stages of creating a scholarly piece of work – from the preparation of a project through to the completion and possible publication of the finished article. Includes sections on style, editing, and collaborative writing. It takes a positive and encouraging tone – which will be welcome to those embarking on such tasks for the first time.

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On Writing WellOn Writing Well. This is a best-selling title, now in its sixth edition. It offers reassuring guidance from an experienced journalist on writing more effectively in a number of genres. He covers interviews, travel writing, memoirs, sport, humour, science and technology, and business writing. The approach is to take a passage and analyse it, showing how and why it works, or where it might be improved. It is particularly good on editing and re-writing.

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© Roy Johnson 2009


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