Owen’s spectrum of key style guides
Some journal editors or reviewers provide strong yet inevitably subjective feedback to article authors’ style/syntax/grammar/usages. In a best case, a journal guide will be concise, specific, consistent and full of pertinent examples.
According to Jonathon Owen’s nine-item scale, style guides tend to fall on a spectrum between lawful good and chaotic evil. He writes: “I’ve been thinking a lot about style guides lately, and I decided that what the world really needs right now is the definitive style guide alignment chart… Naturally, there will be some disagreement over the placement of some entries. I’ve also had a lot of calls to include Bluebook, with most people wanting to put it somewhere on the evil axis, while others have wanted to include The Yahoo! Style Guide, The Microsoft Manual of Style, or AMA Manual of Style.”
Here’s how some of the important guides stack up, in his view:
Lawful good:
Neutral good:
Chaotic good:
Lawful neutral:
True neutral:
Chaotic neutral:
Lawful evil:
Neutral evil:
Chaotic evil:
The Chicago Manual of Style
The MLA Handbook
Buzzfeed Style
The Elements of Style
The Wikipedia Style Guide
Wired Style
The New Yorker Style Guide
The AP Stylebook
The American Psychological Association’s Publication Manual.
Lawful good: The Chicago Manual of Style
Neutral good: The MLA Handbook
Chaotic good: Buzzfeed Style
Lawful neutral: The Elements of Style
True neutral: The Wikipedia Style Guide
Chaotic neutral: Wired Style
Lawful evil: The New Yorker Style Guide
Neutral evil: The AP Stylebook
Chaotic evil: The American Psychological Association’s Publication Manual.
Lawful good
A lawful good character “combines a commitment to oppose evil with the discipline to fight relentlessly.” “And boy howdy, is Chicago relentless – the thing is over 1,100 pages!”
Neutral good
“A neutral good character does the best that a good person can do.” “Look, the MLA Handbook certainly tries to do what’s right, even if it can’t make up its mind sometimes.”
Chaotic good
“A chaotic good character acts as his conscience directs him with little regard for what others expect of him.”
Lawful neutral
“A lawful neutral character acts as law, tradition, or a personal code directs her.”
True neutral
A true neutral character “doesn’t feel strongly one way or the other when it comes to good vs. evil or law vs. chaos.” “Wikipedia doesn’t care for your edit wars. There are lots of acceptable style choices, whether you prefer American or British English. Just pick a style and stick with it.”
Chaotic neutral
A chaotic neutral character “avoids authority, resents restrictions, and challenges traditions.” “Wired Style has a chapter called ‘Be Elite’ and another called ‘Screw the Rules.’ The first edition is also printed on day-glow yellow paper, because screw your eyes too. It also has a chapter called ‘Anticipate the Future’ but probably didn’t anticipate that it would go out of print twenty years ago.”
Lawful evil
A lawful evil character “plays by the rules but without mercy or compassion.” The New Yorker “uses jarring diereses to prevent misreading of words that no one has trouble reading, and it doubles consonants in words like focussed because it said so, that’s why. It also unnecessarily sets off certain phrases with commas based on a hyperliteral idea of what restrictive and nonrestrictive mean. Tell me that’s not mercilessly evil.”
Fittingly, a satirical fake news piece by Clickhole fake-quotes The New Yorker editor David Remnick as follows: “We think it looks cool… Oprah is Öprah… our in-house style guide is world-renowned, and we employ some of the best copywriters in the country, and now they’re job is to stick twö döts ön töp öf every O they see. We’re the göddamn New Yörker. Anyöne whö cömes för us över the döts is göing tö end up lööking like a pretty huge dumbass.” Owen again: “Nöw yöu know.”
Neutral evil
“A neutral evil villain does whatever she can get away with.”
Chaotic evil
A chaotic evil character is “arbitrarily violent” and “unpredictable.” “Have you ever seen APA-style references? Some titles are in title case, while others are in sentence case. And, for reasons I can’t understand, volume numbers are italicized but issues numbers aren’t, even though there’s no space between them. ‘Arbitrarily violent’ is the best description of that mess that I’ve seen.”
Sources
Jonathon Owen (3 September 2019): The style guide alignment chart.
Jonathon Owen (24 March 2020): Umlauts, diaereses, and The New Yorker.
Clickhole (21 January 2020): Going rogue: ‘The New Yorker’ has announced that they’re going to start putting an umlaut over every letter ‘o’ and no one can stop them.
Wikipedia (n.d.): The New Yorker.