Style Meister: The Quick-Reference Custom Style Guide

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Summary: Indispensable for writers, authors, and editors
Review: If you are a writer, author, or editor, you know that consistency of document styles is not only important for a professional appearance, but often essential to proper understanding. To help you create stylistically consistent documents, you probably have several style guides on your shelf -- Strunk and White, Associated Press, Chicago, the Microsoft Manual of Style, or any number of others. In some situations you use one, in other situations you find the advice of another more appropriate.

Style Meister puts an end to that annoyance and confusion by giving you all the tools and advice you need to build your own style guides, customized to the needs of your organization, your audience(s), or your market. Style Meister itself is not an authoritative style guide in the vein of Strunk and White or Associated Press. Instead, Style Meister helps you choose and manage styles that best fit the purpose of your documents. No matter whether you write fiction, edit non-fiction, or work for a bureau with hundreds of clients and hundreds of different styles, this book walks you through all the steps necessary to become your own authority on the best styles for your documents.

The narrative sections provide excellent advice on choosing appropriate usage for hundreds if not thousands of style points. These sections compare recommendations from a variety of sources, and note variations for formal, informal, and other usages. The quick reference sections provide hands-on forms for everything from selecting punctuation styles to tracking style items in your current documents that must be searched for and replaced.

In summary, I have rarely seen a more useful book for anyone who writes or edits for a living. With Style Meister, you can throw out all your so-called "authoritative" style guides and create your own personal style authority, customized specifically for your needs. Goodbye, Strunk and White! Goodbye, Associated Press! Hello, Style Meister!

Rating:
Summary: An style guide you didn't know you needed until you read it.
Review: Whether you write for your living, live for your writing, or "merely" have to communicate in writing as a necessary part of your occupation, once you have read "Style Meister" it is likely to become a permanent part of your reference collection. Much of its charm lies in the upfront admission that English has many "right" rules that contradict each other. However, it points out that to clearly communicate, your writing should be consistent. If you are writing as a member of a team, or within an organization, it is very important that you are all on the same page. "Style Meister" offers you simple procedures to help promote that consistency. Ms. Castle labored for some time in a service bureau which typeset a multitude of projects for many clients, many of whom employed different styles. Therefore, she developed an extremely convenient system of charts to keep track of these variations. They are just as helpful for making style decisions once and having them to refer to any time in the future. The writing is clear, concise, and "no nonsense." When I have a question about style, I consult "Style Meister" and discover what the alternatives might be from which to choose. The only part of the book I found less useful was that which discusses computer programs. The information there is helpful in describing techniques, but the programs discussed are fairly dated. I would guess that Ms. Castle is a Mac person, because the PC references are the most behind the present. In short, I consider this to be an excellent book and well worth the cost and the shelf space.