Editor's Corner

Dear Editrix,

What is the difference between APA, MLA, CMOS, CSE, AMA, and IEEE?

Sincerely,

Mr. Inquisitive

Dear Mr. Inquisitive,

Thank you for the question!

These are all acronyms for the various style guides out there. Style guides include rules for grammar, language use, headings, fonts, numbering, and how to format citations. There is more to them than that, but I don’t want to bore you.

From the Purdue OWL:

Style guides are used as a way of making common elements consistent across documents written by many writers, in many places, and in many circumstances; as a result, readers from any university (or other audience groups) can read a paper written in APA style and know immediately how to navigate the headings of the paper, which details will be listed in the abstract, how quotes will be introduced and marked, where to look for important citation information, and what each citation element represents.

The primary difference between these citation styles lies in their discipline-specific focus (social sciences, humanities, history, sciences, medicine, or engineering) and their in-text citation methods (author-date, page numbers, or numbering).

Here are the acronyms, what the acronyms stand for, the field that uses them, and their emphasis.

Thank you for the question!

Kara Church | Technical Editor, Advisory | Knowledge Enablement

Pronouns: she/her | Call via Teams | jackhenry.com

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