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> APA is for academic writing, Chicago is for 'trade' or 'professional' writing.
I have to disagree with both parts of this statement.
The APA (American Psychological Association) style guide is only appropriate for a small segment of academic writing, namely psychology and the social sciences. It is basically useless and inappropriate for other types of academic writing.
And while the Chicago Manual of Style is used in "'trade' or 'professional' writing", it's foundation is *academic* writing, since it is the house style guide of the University of Chicago Press, the largest university press in the US.
The point is that there are many different types and subtypes of writing, not just a broad division between "academic" and "trade or professional". And because of this, there is a large number of style guides specific to many of these different types and subtypes. There are at least a half-dozen well known and widely used style guides for academic writing in specific fields (ACS for chemistry, ASA for social sciences, CSE for life sciences, MHRA and MLA for the arts and humanities, IEEE for computer science, etc.). The most comprehensive and therefore most broadly applicable academic style guide is Chicago, largely because the press that compiles it publishes such a broad range of academic and scholarly books and journals. But even Chicago is only partly appicable to most types of technical writing.
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