What is a style manual?

Answer 1

A style manual is a set of writing style guidelines for a certain publication or type of publications.

The same fact could be written several correct ways in English - each in its own style. One way may be more formal, the other more friendly. Or there could be valid differences of opinion on use of the colon in parts of a sentence.

In a style manual - for the New York Times, e.g - all persons are referred to with a title. Even the alleged arson murderer -Mr. Jones. .So if you write for the NYTimes, you know how to name people. This particular style is now so quaint, that an unidentified news article using it would automatically be suspected as sourced from the NY Times.

The New Yorker - the magazine - has a style manual (not public that I know of) that promotes that TONE...guiding on word usage, even topics to be avoided.

Scholarly journals have very public style manuals. Much of it certains around how to describe the sources of all your information for the research project results you want to publish in their journal. There must be universal rules in how to place the author w/respect to the editor w/r to the title of the article because the Uzbekistan scientist who wants to replicate the experiments or track down the citations needs to know that the word between the 2nd set of colons is an author name - not the title of the article. If the article has been translated into Uzbeki, the citations are not. And so it is not obvious at all what are personal names and what are journal names, etc.

As for the style dictating this entry - I have clearly broken puncuation rules and even created new words. probably wouldn't pass any print editor's style manual.