The Associated Press Stylebook

What Hacker News says

1. joegahonaJun 2023
   Readable and fun, but extremely useful:

   • Lapsing into a Comma, Bill Walsh (RIP)

   • The 10% Solution, Ken Rand (for editing down wordy text)

   • Sin and Syntax, Constance Hale

   • Woe Is I, Patricia T. O'Conner

   More resource-like and grammar-heavy:

   • Words Into Type, Marjorie E. Skillin (hard-core grammar rules, great section on redundancies)

   • Chicago Manual of Style (in general, the core style of book and magazine writing)

   • Associated Press Stylebook (in general, the core style of newspaper writing)

   • Garner's Modern English Usage, Bryan A. Garner

   • Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage

   • Dictionary of American Idioms, Maxine Tull Makkai

   Not about writing, but hilarious and snobby and awesome -- great airplane reading:

   • The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations, Charles Harrington Elster

   Show morethread
2. joegahonaDec 2022
   I was an editor before getting into tech, and these are the books that still hold up 20 years later:

   Readable and fun, but extremely useful:

   • Lapsing into a Comma, Bill Walsh (RIP)

   • The 10% Solution, Ken Rand (for editing down wordy text)

   • Sin and Syntax, Constance Hale

   • Woe Is I, Patricia T. O'Conner

   More resource-like and grammar-heavy:

   • Words Into Type, Marjorie E. Skillin (hard-core grammar rules, great section on redundancies)

   • Chicago Manual of Style (in general, the core style of book and magazine writing)

   • Associated Press Stylebook (in general, the core style of newspaper writing)

   • Garner's Modern English Usage, Bryan A. Garner

   • Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage

   • Dictionary of American Idioms, Maxine Tull Makkai

   Not about writing, but hilarious and snobby and awesome -- great airplane reading:

   • The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations, Charles Harrington Elster

   Show morethread
3. mkr-hnNov 2012
   The Elements of Style is to K&R what The Voynich Manuscript is to On the Origin of Species. Elements of Style is good to read to see one person's ideas on style from a century ago, but it's not a guide to writing.

   If you have a need for guidelines but don't want to develop your own, many major publications publish style books. For example: The Associated Press Stylebook, The Chicago Manual of Style. APA and MLA work too.

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4. projektfuMay 2021
   Usually publishing organizations have house rules and the copy hews to these rules. NPR uses the spellings in Webster’s New World College Dictionary Fifth Edition, and then has a few rules of their own.

   A more algorithmic rule is found in APA style: https://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2016/10/hyphenation-stati...

   Edit: NPR also uses the Associated Press Stylebook and related resources.

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5. cghFeb 2015
   Both the Associated Press Stylebook and the Chicago Manual of Style recommend spelling out numbers less than nine and ninety-nine, respectively.
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