The Christian Writer's Manual of Style: Updated and Expanded Edition

This is a wonderful resource!! I have used it so many times, the dog ears have double dog ears! This book can turn your writing into a professional looking piece of material that will help you sell it much faster than trying to proof read your work yourself. Spell check can't even come close to doing the job this book can do for you.

This book is invaluable to someone like myself who does a lot of Christian writing. I have referred to it often when writing articles for my Web site and newsletter and when working on my books and even on my Analytical-Literal Translation of the New Testament: Third Edition. It provides an overview of proper punctuation, capitalization, special formatting like italics and small caps, and abbreviations. Most any English grammars would provide such information. But what makes this book special is it focuses on the special needs of Christian writers. So the list of abbreviations, for instance, includes the proper abbreviations for all 66 canonical books, along with for the apocryphal and pseudepigrapha books. It also provides lists of proper capitalization, like if "apocryphal" and "pseudepigrapha" in my previous sentence should be capitalized (they shouldn't). It also shows that when quoting a Scripture verse and giving the verse reference at the end of the sentence, the period should come after the parentheses, e.g., "And he called His name Jesus" (Matthew 1:25). This book also told me that I did not need to use an ellipse in this Scripture quote. Even though I only quoted a part of the verse, what I quoted was a complete sentence. You can see that I even referred to this book in writing this review. So I highly recommend it.

This book addresses all the little questions a writer has in that moment of not being sure about grammar, sentence construction, but so much more. It could have been titled, "The Christian Writer's Second Best Friend". I keep it beside my computer next to my Dictionary and Thesaurus.

If you're even reading this, you probably felt the need for a Christian style guide. If that describes you, save your time, ignore the rest of my review, and click the "Buy Now" button :)But if you're still unconvinced...This style manual covers every imaginable style-related issue, particularly for religious writing; basically just about style-related issue you'll encounter as a Christian writer, whether you're writing about Internet technology and how it relates to eschatology, or a critique of Islam from a Christian perspective.And it doesn't just cover the religious issues; the standard style issues like punctuation, capitalization, acronyms, etc. are covered in good detail. It even has a section on British English.This is probably the most current and exhaustive style manual for Christian writers around, and every serious Christian writer concerned about style and consistency should get one.I seldom give 5 stars, but this one deserves it.

"The Christian Writer's Manual of Style" provides the most exhaustive coverage of the special writing problems in the area of Christian publications that I have ever seen. This is easily the best book available on the subject of Christian writing style. Examples of the items covered here that are unlikely to be covered anywhere else include abbreviations for Bible books including apocryphal writings, the difference between sacred writings and the bible, should the use of the word "biblical" be capitalized or not, the difference between the Anglican Church and the Church of England, Bible permissions for quoting different versions and where to write for permissions, biblical and religious terms, clerical titles, forms of Christian books, Islamic terminology, Jewish terminology, and religious jargon. In addition to this specialized information it also includes the stuff you would expect in any manual of style including commonly misspelled words, syntax rules, punctuation, proofreading, etc. Of course in any book of this depth some items are bound to become outdated quickly. For example, there are a couple of references to Word Publishing as a division of Thomas Nelson Publishing. Word Publishing no longer exists. Still this is the only outdated information I found in the entire book, which is pretty amazing. "The Christian Writer's Manual of Style" is a highly recommended read for anyone writing for the Christian market, and especially if you are writing non-fiction.