Editorial Freelancers Association

I am ecstatic to announce that my self-paced course, “An Overview of Six Style Manuals,” is now open for enrollment through the Editorial Freelancers Association (EFA). My course examines how the six major style guides used in American publishing cover 160+ topics, including the basics of abbreviations, capitalization, grammar, hyphenation, punctuation, and spelling; but also advertising, agriculture, animal sciences, anthropology, art, artificial intelligence, astronomy, botany, business and commerce, copyright and permissions, demonyms, diseases and disorders, dissertations and theses, earth sciences, eponyms, fiction editing, figures, footnotes and endnotes, indexing, languages, manuscript preparation, maps, measurement units, medicine, meteorology, music, nomenclature, numbers and numerals, physiology, poetry, prefixes and suffixes, trademarks, typography and fonts, sports, statistics, symbols, tables, and many more. The guides you will learn about are the Chicago Manual of Style, the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA), the Associated Press Stylebook (AP), the American Medical Association Manual of Style (AMA), the Council of Science Editors Manual (CSE), and the U.S. Government Publishing Office Style Manual (GPO). Why these guides and not others? I explain why in module 1. The course presents the major similarities and differences among the guides. For example, you'll learn which guides recommend using periods in academic and Latin abbreviations (B.A., M.A., M.S., Ph.D.; e.g., i.e., et al., etc.) and which ones don't (MA, MA, MS, PhD; eg, ie, et al, etc); how the guides differ in the way they present probability values (P < 0.01; p < .01); which guides recommend possessive eponyms (Alzherimer's disease, Parkinson's disease) and which ones don't (Alzheimer disease, Parkinson disease), and which guides say healthcare should appear as one word and which ones recommend two words (health care). Each module contains a short summary of the guide, including its history, intended audience, and strengths and weaknesses. I provide a short summary of what constitutes “Chicago style” or “APA style,” for example, and a few highlights of what each guide has to say on both common and unique topics. Each module also contains a downloadable 20-page table that explains where each topic is discussed in the guide (if it is discussed—not all guides discuss all topics) and a short summary of what the guide says about it. In addition, module 2 contains a large, 65-page index that explains how each topic is covered by each guide. The course consists of 19 lessons divided into 9 modules. You can sign up for the entire course or for just one or two modules. It's taken me about 2 full years to create the course, and I hope fellow writers and editors find it helpful. Here’s a link to sign up: https://lnkd.in/esVDAJkN Many thanks!