Whether you’re an author, an entrepreneur, a freelancer, or an employee, using a style guide helps you communicate more clearly and professionally. You’ll definitely set yourself apart from the casual bloggers or social media posters!
A style guide is a set of standards to ensure accuracy and consistency in content, formatting, and design. Content includes grammar, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and usage. Naturally, as a writer and editor, I’m focusing on content on this post.
In both trade nonfiction and fiction book publishing, the go-to style is Chicago style. (No, I’m not talking about pizza here.) Chicago (or CMOS) is short for The Chicago Manual of Style, by far the most popular and the most comprehensive style guide in the English-speaking world.
Journalists and digital content creators and marketers typically use The Associated Press Stylebook (AP style). However, it’s not uncommon to use Chicago for web content.
APA (American Psychological Association) style is used in both academia and trade nonfiction when citing sources from the social sciences.
Trade nonfiction and academic writers can alternatively use AMA (American Medical Association) style.
Keep in mind that these style guides follow US conventions, which I observe because I’m based in the US. I’ve chosen Chicago instead of AP for my website because I mainly work on trade nonfiction books.
Commonly used UK English style guide is New Hart’s Rules, published by Oxford University Press. I use this when working with UK authors or authors from other countries where UK English is the standard unless these authors prefer US English or are open to it for some reason.
If your company, client, or employer doesn’t have a specific style guide or house style, you may suggest one. The styles mentioned earlier are the typical default styles on which you may also base your own house style or style sheet. (More on style sheet later.)
Style Guide Examples
Let’s start with examples of different style guides and why it’s important to maintain consistency by taking a little pop quiz here:
Which of the following is (are) correct? (Look carefully.)
- I’m a non-fiction copyeditor – not to be confused with a proofreader. The more you know …
- I’m a non-fiction copy-editor—not to be confused with a proofreader. The more you know …
- I’m a nonfiction copy editor — not to be confused with a proofreader. The more you know …
- I’m a nonfiction copyeditor—not to be confused with a proofreader. The more you know . . .
The answer is . . .
All of the above! (Confused yet?)
It depends on the variety of English and the style guide you use.
The first example follows the general UK convention. A spaced en dash and ellipsis are used. The second one follows New Hart’s Rules. It prefers an unspaced em dash. Certain prefixes (non-, etc.) are hyphenated.
The third and fourth ones follow the US convention—AP style and Chicago style, respectively. Prefixes are unhyphenated in this case.
AP uses a spaced em dash and ellipsis. Copy editing and copy editor are normally open (i.e., written as two words). Prefixes are also unhyphenated in this case.
Chicago uses an unspaced em dash and spaces between dots in an ellipsis.
The Whys and Hows of Using a Style Guide and Creating a Style Sheet
Unfortunately, errors and inconsistencies in self-published books and business web/digital copy and content are quite typical. I often see arbitrary punctuation or even a mishmash of US and UK conventions thrown in together without rhyme or reason. It’s just plain messy, distracting, annoying, and confusing.
I’m not saying you must sacrifice creativity for the other three Cs: clarity, correctness, and consistency. Not at all. You need to strike a balance between creativity and technicality. Creativity involves technicality. You can’t have one without the other. That’s what artful, skillful writing is all about. This principle is similar to those of the visual arts. The elements of artwork—be it web design, graphic design, book or magazine cover design, or photography—need balance and consistency. Decent designers don’t just use a gazillion script fonts (Comic Sans, anyone?) and use all the colors of the rainbow on one page for cool artistic effects. That’s just tacky. Decent designers understand the fundamentals of typography and the color theory for branding purposes. Not surprisingly, marketing and design agencies typically have meticulous style guides.
You most definitely need a style guide for writing. Yes, I’m talking to you authors, entrepreneurs, other professionals, and especially ESL/ESOL folks doing business in English-speaking countries and targeting English-speaking clients or customers. (Do you happen to have celebrity clients? Even more reason to use a style guide or a house style for your written communication and content!) Remember, you’re sharing your expertise and message with the world. You want people to take you seriously. You want to be known as the authority in your field, so just having a snazzy website for your marketing agency or life coaching practice or running a book marketing and promo campaign alone to reach best-selling status isn’t going to cut it. Consistency matters, especially for branding and credibility. It separates professional material from amateur dreck. It’s all about integrity. A style guide can help you achieve it.
You can use more than one set of conventions in your writing and even occasionally break a rule or two as long as you do the following:
1. Make sure you know the rules before you bend them. It’s always safest to abide by them if you’re a beginning writer, a new author, or an ESL/ESOL writer. You don’t want your writing to look like you’re texting or emailing your buddy or casually posting on social media. Don’t approach writing like making a trail mix—tossing in a bunch of random stuff together and hoping to God it tastes great.
If you want some artistic license (I’m sure you do at some point!), please read publications in your preferred genre or niche voraciously. Observe the styles and conventions in that particular genre or niche and how experienced authors preserve and experiment with the rules. How do these authors punctuate? What about their word choice and phrasing? Of course, you can enlist the help of a writing coach and/or an editor as you go.
2. Keep track of your style choices on a style sheet so you and other people involved in your project or organization can use them consistently.
Let’s say you’re going against the grain by capitalizing certain words that are normally lowercased in Chicago or AP style. Maybe you want to use a combination of certain US and UK conventions to reach both US and UK audiences, or you’re an experienced writer who want to exercise poetic license by breaking some rules or mix some rules from two different style guides to reflect your background.
As for the first scenario, I’d prefer to capitalize certain dog breeds (Dachshund as opposed to dachshund and Schnauzer instead of schnauzer) in accordance with German grammatical rules: all nouns are capitalized. In addition, I’d also preserve diacritical marks in the original Spanish and French for words such as café, jalapeño, façade, naïve, and résumé that are usually optional or omitted in English (cafe, jalapeno, facade, naive, and resume). I’d insist on spelling tempeh as tempe. The latter is the original spelling in Indonesian, my native language, but I’d have to let my readers know about it beforehand so it wouldn’t be confused with Tempe, Arizona. If I were to write a book or an article with the elements mentioned earlier, I’d let my copyeditor know about them and have him or her note them on the style sheet. My preferences reflect my love for and experience in language learning. (For the record, as English is my second language, I had to work hard to achieve native English proficiency while tackling Spanish, German, and French—in that order. I observed different grammatical points as well as punctuation and capitalization conventions for each language. Noticing those nuances prepared me for copyediting. This is also why I have a passion for and obsession with helping people express themselves well in writing.)
In the second scenario, for example, I’d use -ize verb ending to reconcile US and UK conventions. It’s the standard in US English, and it’s a perfectly acceptable alternative to -ise in UK English. (I know this because I had studied UK English, considered the gold standard in many countries back in the day, before learning US English.) I know of an editor-author who was looking for professionals to edit his book on fiction writing targeting both US and UK audiences.
The third scenario was a real-life situation. A journalist-author I worked with nixed the Oxford comma for the most part except for a few complex sentences, as AP generally doesn’t use the Oxford comma except in some cases to ensure clarity. The author was okay with Chicago style for the rest of his book. We consistently applied the rules we had chosen throughout the book. If I picked AP for a certain project, I’d choose to adhere to most of its rules except one—the Oxford comma. It avoids ambiguity, and for that reason, it’s quite useful, so you’ll have to pry it from my dead, cold hands.
That said, let your editor—specifically, a copyeditor—know about your preferences. Discuss them and work them out with your editor. He or she can best advise you and note your preferences on the style sheet. Your editor also lists some of the most important rules and conventions from a style guide (or style guides) relevant to the particular manuscript, content, or document you’re working on. A style sheet helps your proofreader perform the final check before publication.
Now you can see why a style guide and a style sheet based on a style guide (or a combination of two style guides) is essential to ensure consistency, clarity, and correctness in a manuscript, article, a piece of content, or copy. Here are links supporting this, especially regarding digital content:
https://uhurunetwork.com/editorial-style-guide/
https://gathercontent.com/blog/tone-of-voice-guide
https://freshdesk.com/the-blog-style-guide
https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-style-guide/
(Editor’s note: I’ve noticed punctuation inconsistencies on these websites. For example, the first Texas-based website says it uses AP as its official style guide, but it uses the Oxford comma and Chicago-style em dash across the board. It hyphenates non-, which should be unhyphenated in both AP and Chicago [nonjournalism instead of non-journalism—the latter is common in UK English]. It also uses single quotation marks, which are customary in UK English. US English uses double quotation marks. In addition, the single quotation marks are unnecessary and incorrect in one particular example: ‘i’ before ‘e’ except before ‘c.’ It should be “i before e except before c.” Please disregard these oopsies and focus only on the content itself. It covers all the essentials in detail, so that’s why I’ve chosen to include it here.)
How Editors and Proofreaders Can Help You with Style Guides and Style Sheets
If you need help with picking the right writing wardrobe, so to speak, feel free to ask me and grab your free copy of Find a Real Editor, a guidebook that my colleagues and I cowrote, in which we talk about style guides and more. If you plan to work with potential editors and/or proofreaders, make sure they know what a style guide is. Otherwise, drop them like a hot potato.
Think of us editors and proofreaders as your wardrobe specialists, hairstylists, and makeup artists. Remember, we’re on your team! We want to make you look good. We pick styles that fit your body type, personality, and tastes. We want you to write in style. When it comes to writing, we aim to do what cartoonist, author, humorist, playwright, and journalist James Thurber described in his quote: “Editing should be . . . a counseling rather than a collaborating task. The tendency of the writer-editor to collaborate is natural, but he should say to himself, ‘How can I help this writer to say it better in his own style?’ and avoid ‘How can I show him how I would write it, if it were my piece?’”
Now that you know how to be stylish, strut your writing stuff!
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