What Is a Style Guide and Why Do You Need One?
Nothing is worse than publishing something you’ve written and getting feedback from your readers letting you know your writing is full of errors. Or worse, your writing is rejected by a publisher or company because what you’ve written doesn’t follow their guidelines.
Have the rules of writing changed since your last English class? Aren’t the little blue, green, and red squiggly lines under your text in your word processor enough to make sure your writing is ready to publish? How are you supposed to know what guidelines to follow in the first place?
Here’re the answers you’re looking for: Yes, no, and it depends.
What Is a Style Guide
A writing style guide is a set of writing standards developed for a specific industry, genre, brand, product, or publishing platform. Style guides for writing establish rules for grammar, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, formatting, word usage, language bias, and other writing best practices. Writers and editors rely heavily on style guides to ensure every piece of content is clear, consistent, and ready for their readers.
And just because you learned the rules of writing once doesn’t mean you’re set for a lifetime of error-free writing. Style guides evolve over time to reflect changes in culture, technology, and language. Two spaces after a period are a thing of the past and “they” is now an acceptable singular pronoun. This makes staying up to date with changes to your style guide a key component of the writing process.
Why You Need a Style Guide
In a nutshell, a style guide will ensure your writing is consistent. If you’re writing a novel, your readers are going to expect dialogue to be formatted with quotation marks, proper subject-verb agreement, and appropriate use of punctuation. If you’re managing a team of writers or submitting an article for publication, a style guide will ensure all content matches the brand voice and tone and consistent application of language across all platforms.
Style guides are also one of the most important resources for your editorial team. Without a guide to reference, your editor won’t know which writing rules to follow. For example, some style guides call for spaces around an em dash and other style guides require no spaces around an em dash. A writing style guide also saves you and your editor time. Instead of guessing which rules to follow or making a decision based on a gut-feeling, you can quickly flip through your guide to get a definitive answer.
Style Guides vs. Brand Guides
A quick Google search for “What is a style guide” will yield mixed results. About half the results will give you information about brand style guides and the other half are about writing style guides. Both outline the guidelines for a company or brand’s identity but a brand guide is focused on the look and feel of your brand while a style guide is specifically for your written content.
Think of it this way: Brand guides are for visuals and experience and style guides are for words and publishing. Companies often have both types of guides to ensure consistency across all platforms. For authors and freelance writers, a style guide will ensure your writing is compliant with your publisher’s standards and a brand guide will help you create brand recognition across your website and social media platforms.
Popular Style Guides
Remember when I said there were different style guides for specific industries, genres, brands, products, or publishing platforms? I wasn’t kidding. There are style guides for novels, journalism, digital publication, scholarly writing, scientific writing, research, citations, alternative fields of study or creative writing, and custom guides developed for a specific business. Fortunately, all of these guides can be sorted into two major categories: traditional or industry guides and brand-specific guides.
Traditional or Industry Style Guides
Associated Press Stylebook (AP Style)
The Associated Press Stylebook is the go-to guide for journalists and some magazines and has recently become the standard for content marketing and blogging because of their standards on emerging topics and cultural trends. Major editions of the AP guide are published every other year although the editors of the guide update the online edition on a rolling basis. You can even follow The Associated Press on Twitter to ask questions and get real-time, topical updates from their staff.
The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS)
The Chicago Manual of Style has been published by the University of Chicago Press since 1906 and is the standard guide for the book publishing industry. As one of the most comprehensive and widely-used guides, the CMOS 17th edition comes in at a whopping 1150 pages. Fortunately, this guide is also accessible online and is easily searchable. CMOS also provides guidance on publishing standards, formatting, and best practices for writing and editing.
American Psychological Association (APA)
APA Style was created in 1929 by a group of business managers, anthropologists, and psychologists. The guidelines were developed in order to make scientific writing easier to understand. Today, APA style is used in scholarly journals and academia, specifically social sciences, natural humanities, and health care.
Modern Language Association (MLA)
The MLA Handbook provides guidelines for the formatting of academic papers and is widely used as the standard for source citations in academic and nonfiction writing. As this style guide applies most broadly to literature and the humanities, MLA is often one of the first style guides students may be introduced to in middle or high school.
Brand-Specific Style Guides
The rise of the internet has made publishing more accessible. These days, businesses, authors, freelancers, and hobbyists are publishing content across a wide range of platforms including blogs, podcasts, YouTube, Twitter, websites, journals, and independent publishing houses.
Because of this, brands are developing their own style guides to ensure consistency in their writing everywhere their words are published online. These in-house guides are critical for freelance writers who may be under contract to write articles for a company or who are pitching articles to multiple brands. In-house style guides are also key for editorial teams to ensure all writing looks and sounds the same — no matter whose name is in the byline.
When it comes to developing custom in-house style guides, most companies and brands select a traditional style guide (like AP or CMOS) as their “base” and create a list of exceptions, addendums, or industry-specific language to govern their writing. Here are some examples of in-house style guides for writing:
Which Style Guide Is Right for You?
With so many options out there, which style guide is right for you? The best guide is the one specifically made for the type of content you’re writing and where you’re going to publish. If you’re writing a fiction novel and plan to pursue traditional or independent publishing, you should use the Chicago Manual of Style. If you’re a freelancer or business owner publishing content on your blog, you should use the AP Stylebook as your primary style guide.
If you’re writing for a specific publisher or online publication, make sure you do a bit of research to find out which style guide they’re using. This will help you create manuscripts and articles that require less editing and reduce the amount of time you’ll have to spend searching the internet for a specific, long-forgotten grammar rule. Most companies and publishers make their in-house style guides available for freelancers and publishers often include their submission standards on their websites.
Style guides for writing are an essential tool for writers, editors, and publishers. Not only do style guides set the standards for grammar, spelling, punctuation, formatting, and publishing, they are a reflection of our evolving culture and language. Knowing how to use a style guide makes you a more valuable writer and can save you and your editor time throughout the publishing process. Of course, you’re not expected to know every single rule, but understanding how to use the guide as a reference is a huge step in the right direction. Trust me, your editor — and readers — will thank you.
