USING STYLE GUIDES AND REFERENCES IN THE BUILDING SCIENCES
Authors: Copper Cathryn 
Published: November 2024

What are style guides?

A style guide is a book of specifications used by publishers and printers to ensure that books and journal articles look professional, that they have a consistent layout and appearance, and that they accommodate their readers’ particular interests. Because professional organizations commonly have publishing components, most professional organizations have developed style guides of their own. Such organizations include, but are surely not limited to, the American Institute of Physics (AIP), the American Society of Mechanical Engineering (ASME), the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), and the American Institute of Architects (AIA).

Among book-length style guides, the most widely used style guides include The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA), The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) IEEE Standards Style Manual, and The Modern Language Association Style Guide (MLA). The Turabian Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses and Dissertations was produced by the University of Chicago Press to govern the production of graduate theses, and it has become widely accepted as a style guide for academic writing. The University of Chicago Press also publishes the authoritative Chicago Manual of Style.

The academic disciplines serving the built environment are vast. The mechanical engineer may be involved in heat transfer and the insulation of buildings; the electrical engineer may be involved in lighting, wiring and solar energy; the civil engineer is essential to understand materials and their various stresses and strains, and the architect is the professional tasked with preparing the guiding design that brings the building together into a unifying, aesthetic whole. Each of these disciplines has its own unique style guide often set forth by the professional organizations that represent them. Please check with the instructor of your course for their preferred style guide when writing reports. For the architecture student particularly, The American Institute of Architects (see AIA at https://www.aia.org/) offers a concise style guide (see https://content.aia.org/sites/default/files/2021-01/Content-Style-Guide-2021.pdf) that may prove useful. Architecture students can also refer to resources on writing about architecture like How Architects Write (Routledge, 2017) and Writing Architecture: A Practical Guide to Clear Communication About the Built Environment (Wiseman, 2014).

In addition to specifying document design and page layout, style guides offer detailed discussions of ethics in research, appropriate approaches to research documentation, data preservation, conflicts of interest, and acknowledging the contributions of colleagues, subordinates and other researchers.

Most professional journals provide online style guides, which are usually listed as “author information.” These guides only briefly define the layout and format requirements of the journal, although during copyediting a journal will typically provide a template that encodes the journal's print standards. Beyond this, author information guides usually provide considerable information about copyright and ownership of your submitted documents, and they will usually disclose the review criteria and procedures used by the journal's review editors.

Most students will have limited direct contact with professional style guides. However, most instructors will provide specifications for the reports in their courses, and these specifications can be treated as a simplified style guide. Usually, an instructor's classroom style guide will be based on the guides provided by professional organizations—to familiarize students with professional standards—but with adjustments to facilitate efficient grading. In most cases, students will be aware of the instructor's style guide only in the format that is defined for reference citations and for the list of works cited. The remainder of this text focuses on these.