How to Teach Yourself AMA Style

If you need to learn AMA style (AMA Manual of Style, 10th edition), you can check the websites of various editorial professional associations for courses on the topic. The American Medical Writers Association and the Editorial Freelancers Association, for example, periodically offer courses, workshops, and webinars on medical style.

But while you're waiting for courses to open up, you can cobble together your own program for learning AMA style:

• Buy a hardcover copy of the style manual and a subscription to the online version. There is an online form for ordering an individual subscription. Each day, spend 30 minutes to an hour studying a different portion of the manual until you've worked your way through it.
 
• Follow the advice in the handout "How to Learn a Style Guide in 10 Days" (a PDF) from the 2012 conference of the American Copy Editors Society.
 
• Bookmark the following sections of the manual, both in the hardcover and online:
 
• Proper usage: chapter 11
 
• Abbreviations for clinical, technical, and other common terms: chapter 11, section 14.11
 
• Units of measure: chapter 14, section 14.12
 
• Terminology for various medical specialties: chapter 15
 
• Reference lists: chapter 3
 
• Style for reference-list entries, within chapter 3:
 
• Regarding a journal article: section 3.11 (pages 47–52)
 
• Regarding printed books and chapters within them: section 3.12 (pages 52–56)
 
• Regarding newspaper articles: section 3.13.1 (page 57)
 
• Regarding government or agency bulletins: section 3.13.2 (pages 57–58)
 
• Regarding theses or dissertations: section 3.13.4 (pages 58–59)
 
• Regarding unpublished material: section 3.13.8 (pages 59–61)
 
• Regarding electronic media (such as online journals, websites, online conference proceedings, email list messages): section 3.15 (pages 63–72)

• Follow the blog AMA Style Insider.
 
• Take the many style quizzes available from the online version of the manual.
 
• Look at samples of AMA-style reference-list entries and citations. You can find additional samples via an online search, but check them against the manual itself to make sure they are valid.
 
• Take the inexpensive AMA style test, such as this one and this other one, offered by medical writer Emma Hitt Nichols. If you are subscribed to the HittList, which is a subscription email listing job opportunities for medical writers, watch for occasional announcements there of the availability of additional style tests for purchase.
 
• Purchase and listen to CDs from these audio conferences offered by Copyediting newsletter^*:
 
• "Common Problems in Medical Editing" (presenter: Katharine O'Moore-Klopf, self-employed medical editor and managing editor of the Journal of Urgent Care Medicine)
 
• "Common Problems in Science Editing" (presenter: Carolyn Joyce Brown, self-employed science and medical editor; formerly manager of the journals program for Research Press of the National Research Council of Canada)
 
• "Medical Copyediting: The Mechanics of Medical Editing"  (Daniel Sosnoski, editor-in-chief, Chiropractic Economics)
 
• "Medical Copyediting: Using the AMA Manual" (presenter: Stacy Christiansen, managing editor, JAMA)

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^*Note: After I wrote this post, Copyediting newsletter was redesigned after being sold to new owners. Thus, the links to the audio CDs given above no longer work. That may change as the site redesign continues. I will supply updated links for the CDs when they become available. This post was last updated on July 7, 2016.