About this site

Plain-English guides to the formatting rules people are expected to know and are rarely taught.

Why it exists

Most formatting advice online is either a style manual written for specialists or a thin page assembled to sell something. Neither helps much at eleven at night when an essay is due and you cannot remember whether the reference list is double spaced.

These guides aim at the middle: enough detail to actually finish the document, written for someone who has not read the manual and does not intend to.

Who writes them

The site is run by the maintainer of XobaWrite, a free browser-based word processor. It is a small, independent project, not a company, and there is no editorial team behind it.

How accuracy is handled

Style rules change between editions — APA moved from its 6th edition to its 7th in 2019, and plenty of advice online still describes the old one. Each guide names the edition it follows and carries the date it was last checked.

Where a style has no single authority — Harvard being the obvious case — the guide says so rather than presenting one interpretation as definitive. Your institution's own guide always outranks anything here, and each page says so.

If you spot something wrong or out of date, please say so. Corrections are genuinely welcome and the source for the whole project is public on GitHub.

How the site is paid for

The guides are free and always will be. The site carries advertising to cover its costs, and ads are kept out of the reading flow — nothing covers the text, nothing moves as you scroll, nothing plays on its own.

The editor itself carries no advertising at all. That is a deliberate decision rather than an oversight: ad code is third-party JavaScript, and letting it run on a page that holds your documents would give it access to them. Keeping the two on entirely separate sites means it cannot, regardless of what the ad code does.