My shelf of style guides includes the American Chemical Society style guide (choice of name/date and numbered), the Associated Press style guide (no guidance, unsurprisingly I guess), the MLA, the American Psychological Association (widely used in the social sciences, name/date, and the most incredibly, narrowly prescriptive approach you could dream of in your worst nightmares), the U.S. Government Printing Office (refers you to Chicago), and Chicago. I have to deal with this stuff a lot; not only are there all the different manuals, but every journal has its own style, and most of them are incredibly prescriptive about every little comma and italicization. Cleaning up the references is the Augean stables of a typical edit.
I primarily edit scientific publications, and so I'm used to name/date and comfortable with it. But it does cause problems in historical fields, where you may be citing a work that has a date of original publication and a date of the edition cited—and in some cases also a date of first publication of the English translation. Listing the work by the date of the edition cited produces exactly the kind of false sense of historical sequence you refer to; listing it by the date of original publication doesn't help anyone find the version you used, which may be needed to make the page numbers meaningful. And some authors get sloppy and go back and forth between the two in a single list!
I've been seeing [. . .] in some quotations in recent edits. I don't like it; the . . . makes the point well enough. Though one of my pet bugbears is the use of the ellipsis character built into Word, which has three dots with no spaces, instead of three dots with nonbreaking spaces.
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Date: 2013-10-16 12:38 am (UTC)I primarily edit scientific publications, and so I'm used to name/date and comfortable with it. But it does cause problems in historical fields, where you may be citing a work that has a date of original publication and a date of the edition cited—and in some cases also a date of first publication of the English translation. Listing the work by the date of the edition cited produces exactly the kind of false sense of historical sequence you refer to; listing it by the date of original publication doesn't help anyone find the version you used, which may be needed to make the page numbers meaningful. And some authors get sloppy and go back and forth between the two in a single list!
I've been seeing [. . .] in some quotations in recent edits. I don't like it; the . . . makes the point well enough. Though one of my pet bugbears is the use of the ellipsis character built into Word, which has three dots with no spaces, instead of three dots with nonbreaking spaces.