Style guides

What’s a style guide?

We’re not talking fashion here — we’re talking grammar, word choices, spelling variations and other preferences when it comes to your writing.

A style guide is essentially a list that keeps track of all your choices for a certain document or publication. You can refer to it when you want to check what choices you made in the past, or if you want another contributor (writer or editor, for example) to match your style.

Keeping an up-to-date style guide will help you maintain consistency in your writing.

When should you make a style guide?

  • When you’re writing a long text (eg, a book, thesis), especially one that you might be writing over a long period of time.

  • When you’re writing multiple texts, of any length (eg, blog posts, articles).

  • When you’re working with another writer, and you want everyone to use the same styles.

In some cases a style guide might be supplied for you — for example, if your boss, client, university or publisher has an established guide already.

It’s okay to make a style guide towards the end of a project too. When I edit someone’s text, I’ll create a style guide if one doesn’t exist already. The author can use and add to it for their future writing.

Sample style guides

Check out style guides for The Guardian and Buzzfeed.

How can you make a style guide?

Here’s a template. You can copy and paste this, and build your own guide.

I highly recommend that you keep your style guide online, for example in a Google Docs file rather than a Microsoft Word file. This is especially true if you’re sharing your guide with anyone else, but it’s good practice anyway. With a local file, you run the risk of ending up with multiple copies, not sure which one is the most up-to-date. Nightmare.

Generally a style guide will be alphabetical — altho certain things could be grouped together outside of the alphabetical list. For example: punctuation preferences, formatting notes, or a list of team members.

I recommend including a note about why you’re adding something to your guide. For example:

  • life cycle (two words)

  • lens (singular, no final ‘e’)

  • focused, focusing (one ‘s’)

Some of these differences come down to US versus international English variants:

  • travelling vs traveling

  • colour vs color

  • towards vs toward

  • centre vs center

If you’re a real maverick, you might even pick and choose your favourite variations across dialects to create your own hybrid English. I’m not judging. 

Then there are other stylistic variations, like:

  • tho vs though

  • thru vs through

And punctuation preferences:

  • eg vs e.g.

  • Dr vs Dr. 

  • vs vs vs.

You might like your em dashes spaced on either side — or closed up. (I like mine spaced.)

You might appreciate reminders for certain similar situations: 

  • 21st century (no superscript, and no capitalisation for century)

  • 21st-century book (hyphenated when phrasal adjective)

You can also use your style guide to keep track of specific details, like unusual spellings, dates, descriptions and so on:

  • Pamala (not Pamela; Will’s wife)

  • Vrouw Maria (sunk 1771)

  • Ford, Ben (anthropologist)

And that’s the gist of a style guide.

Have fun building your own!

If you’ve got any questions about style guides, welcome to ask me. :)

resourcesJessie Janegeneral, tools