The upload screen looks compact, but each option changes specific editorial decisions further down the line. This article unpacks every one of them so you can pick deliberately rather than by guesswork.
Style guides
A style guide is the published reference that a field uses to standardise how writers handle citations, references, headings, capitalisation, number formatting, abbreviations, and the long tail of small consistency rules that turn a draft into a finished manuscript. Different fields prefer different guides. Picking the one your work targets tells the editor which rules to apply.
RightMyWork supports 9 citation styles for academic writing, two book style manuals for fiction and nonfiction, and a Custom style on paid plans. A brief tour of the citation styles:
APA 7th edition
Common in psychology, education, the social sciences, communications, business, and nursing. Uses author-date in-text citations and a reference list. The 7th edition is the current one and differs from earlier editions in several details, so the engine targets 7th specifically.
MLA 9th edition
Standard across the humanities, including literature, languages, philosophy, and many film and cultural studies programmes. Uses author-page in-text citations and a Works Cited list. MLA 9 is the current edition.
Harvard (Cite Them Right)
Harvard is an umbrella label rather than a single published manual, and many universities publish their own house Harvard guide. RightMyWork follows Cite Them Right, a published guide to the Harvard system, with author-date in-text citations and a reference list. If your university uses its own variant, you can describe the differences in custom instructions on paid plans.
Chicago Manual of Style 18th edition
Chicago carries two citation systems, and you pick whichever your field uses. Author-Date puts author-date citations in parentheses with a reference list and suits the social sciences and interdisciplinary work. Notes-Bibliography uses numbered footnotes or endnotes paired with a bibliography and suits history, the arts, and many humanities subfields. The 18th edition is current.
OSCOLA 5th edition
The Oxford Standard for the Citation of Legal Authorities is the dominant style for UK and Commonwealth legal writing. Uses footnotes for citations and a bibliography. OSCOLA 5 is the current edition.
IEEE
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers style is standard across electrical engineering, computer science, and adjacent technical fields. Numeric in-text citations in square brackets paired with a numbered reference list in citation order.
Vancouver
Developed for biomedical and clinical literature. Numeric in-text citations paired with a numbered reference list.
AMA 11th edition
The American Medical Association style is the dominant style across US medical journals. Numeric superscript in-text citations and a numbered reference list. AMA 11 is current.
A None option is not a style guide: it turns off citation-style enforcement entirely and applies only the conventions of your chosen English variant.
Style manuals for fiction and nonfiction
Novels, memoirs and other books follow a publishing style manual rather than a citation style. The fiction and nonfiction editors offer the Chicago Manual of Style (18th edition), the usual choice in US publishing, and the New Oxford Style Manual (3rd edition) for UK fiction and nonfiction.
Custom style
On paid plans, the Editing service also offers a Custom style. Your custom instructions become the style guide, so the editor follows the rules you describe instead of a published manual. Add at least one instruction describing the style you want.
English variants and punctuation
Two variants are supported. Each one controls spelling, idiom, punctuation, and small grammatical preferences that differ across the English-speaking world.
- US English uses American spelling (color, organize, defense), month-day-year date order, and US punctuation: double quotation marks as the primary mark, with commas and periods inside the closing quote.
- UK English uses British spelling (colour, organise, defence), day-month-year date order, and UK punctuation: single quotation marks as the primary mark, with punctuation outside the closing quote unless it belongs to the quoted material.
Punctuation style is not a separate setting: it follows the English variant you pick. Writers following Australian or Canadian conventions should pick the closer variant, UK for Australian English and US or UK for Canadian, and can protect any specific spellings with custom instructions on paid plans.
Serial comma
The serial comma, sometimes called the Oxford comma, is the comma before and or or in a list of three or more items. The default for each style guide differs. APA and Chicago use it. Some journalistic styles and certain newspaper traditions omit it. The toggle on the upload screen lets you override your style guide’s default when you have a specific requirement.
Editorial comments
When this is on, the editor adds Word comments on the key edits to explain its judgement calls: why a citation looked off, why a clearer phrasing was suggested, where it noticed a structural inconsistency across the document. The comments are a teaching tool as much as an editorial one. With comments off, you receive a quieter document containing only the tracked changes. The quality of the edits themselves does not change either way.
Citation handling for Zotero and Mendeley
If your draft was written using a reference manager such as Zotero, Mendeley, or EndNote, your citations are not plain text. They are field codes that the manager updates when you change citation styles or edit your library.
RightMyWork always edits inside those fields without breaking them. Formatting corrections arrive as tracked changes inside the field, and the field stays linked to your library. The editor does not change the author or the year, because your reference manager owns those. Because the field still updates from your library, review and accept the tracked changes first, then refresh your citations in the reference manager.
An optional flatten setting lets you ask the editor to convert citation fields to plain text first. This frees the editor to revise full sentences more aggressively, including the wording around the citation. The trade-off is that your manager links become static. Most writers leave the flatten option off and pick it only when they are submitting a final version.
Autofill missing reference details
Reference lists routinely have gaps: a missing DOI, an unfilled page range, a publisher field left blank, a journal volume that did not survive the import. Autofill, available on Monthly and Yearly plans, looks those gaps up using AI web search and checks DOIs before using them. It is off by default. Details it can verify are added to your references as tracked changes, so you can accept or reject each one. Entries it cannot verify are left as they are for your review.
Putting it together
Style guide and English variant are the two settings that shape almost every editorial decision. Serial comma and comments fine-tune the surface. Citation handling and autofill change how references are treated. Choosing the right combination once at the start saves you from making small corrections across the whole document later.
If you are still unsure which combination to pick, the Getting Started article walks through each step of the upload form.