The Canadian Style: A Guide to Writing and Editing

Dean Tudor is a journalism professor at the Ryerson Polytechnical
Institute and founding editor of the CBRA.

This is the federal government’s style manual. It was first published in French in 1983, and it updates the 1966 Government of Canada Style Manual for Writers’ and Editors’. Its purpose is “to ensure greater formal quality, consistency, and clarity in government writing.” And of course it is non-binding on the rest of us: the government is not prescribing what to do in the scriptoria of the nations — only in its own departments. The manual, which uses the Gage Canadian Dictionary (1983) as an authority, is most useful as a guide for the preparation of memoranda and reports. It is not so useful as a style guide to good writing or to the creation of academic papers and the like. But then there are hundreds of other style guides out there. This one covers abbreviations, hyphenations, spelling, capitalization, numerical expressions, italics, punctuation, footnotes (and bibliographies and indexes), letters, reports and minutes, geographical names, and stereotyping. And it is being offered at a good price, too.