Most writers think that style refers to the way we write, the flair and artistry we bring to words on the page. But in the publishing world, editors and copy editors use the term to refer to the very particular way they treat certain words–putting book titles in italics, say, or using O.K. rather than okay. If you intend to write for publication, it may be useful to pick up one or more of the following books.

The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law. This is the standard in newsrooms all around the country. Journalists love it for its easy-to-use A to Z organization. Also included is a primer on libel and other legal issues. Many individual newspapers have their own style manuals, which add local place names or idioms to the A.P. list of terms.

The Chicago Manual of Style, Fifteenth Edition. This is the manual preferred by magazine and book publishers. The new addition has badly needed advice on handling how to deal with Web sites, URLs, and the like.

MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers and the MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing are the authorities in academia, when it comes to style. They are published by the Modern Language Association. MLA style focuses especially on documenting scholarly borrowings for writing on language and literature. It has been widely adopted by schools, academic departments, and instructors for over half a century, as well as more than 1,100 scholarly and literary journals, newsletters, and university and commercial presses throughout North America and in Brazil, China, India, Japan, Taiwan, and other countries.

Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age. This slender volume broke ground in 1996 when its creators at Wired magazine called it “a beautiful object, a useful tool” for its florescent packaging and comprehensive list of Internet words. It was envisioned as a complement to AP and Chicago, which for a long time did not address the kinds of questions made burning by the Internet. A new version in 1999 included an essay on writing in the age of email. Both volumes are out of print by are available from Constance Hale, who edited them.

I’ve always had a soft spot for William Safire. Of course, I’m too young to hold against him his swordsmanship as Richard Nixon’s speechwriter, especially since the phrases that survived that period—“nattering nabobs of negativism” and “hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history”—seem more laughable than irksome. (Any wordsmith knows that alliteration should never be carried that far.) Even his nastier jabs—calling Hillary Clinton “a congenital liar”—lost their sting in the repartee that followed (a Clinton aide said that the chief of state, “if he were not president,” would have busted Safire’s nose; Safire parried by praising the use of the subjunctive.)

He may have co-opted the Hindu word for “priest” to describe his political commentary, but it was as a language pundit that I came to follow Safire. I first read his syndicated column in the San Francisco Chronicle when I was a young writer. I can’t tell you how many pieces I clipped and copied, forcing them on high-school students and wannabe writers. He was witty on who and whom, tart on tautologies; from Safire I learned that syntax could be sexy, that writing about language could charm.

My true fondness for Safire, though, came in the mid-90s, when I was copy chief at Wired magazine. In a twist on the Oedipal process Harold Bloom describes (in which young writers slay their literary fathers), I made the keyboard my epée, tsk-tsking him for not knowing that zines (from the science-fiction fanzines, which had morphed into webzines and e-zines) were not spelled “zeens.”

That led to my most thrilling Safire moment, in 1996, when Safire recommended my book Wired Style as a Christmas “Gifts for Gab.” I read that particular New York Times magazine column while sitting in a white nightie in my sunny bay window in California. I jumped up, put on a recording of batá drums, and danced to a chant honoring the Afro-Cuban deity Obatala, god of creativity and justice. Not the usual response, surely, to Safire’s “On Language,” but it conveys the power of the moment.

In Safire’s generation (and earlier) the language gods were white, Eastern men—H.W. Fowler, William Strunk, E. B. White, James Kilpatrick, John Simon. There was something subversive about—if not exactly earning a seat at the table—at least having my book in the column.

Friends teasingly dubbed me The Cyber Safire, and the jousting continued. I unchivalrously chided him for insisting that into was the right preposition to follow jacked. No, no, I argued—in is a particle when it follows jack, or log, or for that matter tune, and it needs to retain its terse identity. Safire, or rather his assistants, started calling when questions surfaced about tech terms—coordinates instead of “phone numbers,” blog as a verb. I never talked to the man himself, but every now and then a surprise would arrive by mail: the latest Safire tome, thoughtfully inscribed.

I’m sad that he’s gone. And grateful for his exhilarating example.