Style guides, explained
A style guide, or style manual, is a set of rules for how a piece of writing should be put together and presented. It settles the choices that otherwise change from one writer to the next, like how you punctuate a list or cite a source. Many style guides are mandatory, so you have to follow yours before you can publish.
They range from the big published manuals down to a short in-house guide a company writes for itself.
Style guides matter most in academic and research writing, where you have to match a required style down to the punctuation. If you’re writing a thesis or dissertation, my academic copy editing services cover APA, Chicago, or whatever guide your department sets.
What a style guide is for
No two people write exactly alike. Ask two writers to format the same date and you’ll often get two different answers, each shaped by training and habit. A style guide decides questions like that up front, so everyone writes the same way.
That matters most when more than one person writes for the same piece. Without a shared guide, your reader trips over a date in a new format here and a word spelled two ways there. With a style guide, a business keeps a recognizable voice and a journal or university holds dozens of contributors to a single standard. The longer the document and the bigger the team, the more you need one.
Types of style guides
There are several types of style guides and you can adopt a published one or write your own.
Writing and prose guides handle your language, down to how you punctuate and cite. These are the famous published manuals, and most newspapers and journals keep one of their own.
Visual guides handle how things look, from your typefaces to the spacing around a logo.
Editorial guides capture how an organization sounds: the way it talks to its readers and the tone it wants to hit.
How the major writing style guides differ
The best-known guides differ in two main ways: small points of language, and how they treat citations.
What really separates them is how you cite. Move a paper from one field into another and you can’t just reuse the references; you have to rebuild them to the new style.
APA sets the standard for psychology and the social sciences, and uses author-date citations
MLA rules the humanities, especially literature and languages
Chicago dominates book publishing and history, with two citation systems to choose from; students often use its Turabian version for theses
AP is the journalism standard, and turns up across business and marketing writing too
The sciences and medicine bring their own guides, chiefly the AMA Manual of Style in medicine and CSE in the natural sciences.
Journals are the strictest of all. Most won’t even consider your manuscript until it matches their chosen guide exactly. If your work is heading for a journal, that’s what my journal article editing focuses on.
Style guide vs style sheet
A style guide sets the rules; a style sheet records the calls I make on your specific project.
A published style guide can run to hundreds of pages. A style sheet is smaller and more specific, a short working list I build for one job. It records the decisions that come up as I edit, like an unusual spelling I’ve settled on or a heading style I’m keeping, so a long piece stays consistent with itself.
The main published style guides
Dozens of style guides are in print. Here are the ones you’re most likely to meet, grouped by where each one rules.
Academic and research: APA, the MLA Handbook, The Chicago Manual of Style, and Turabian
Science and medicine: the AMA Manual of Style, Scientific Style and Format (the CSE manual), IEEE style, and Citing Medicine
Journalism and general usage: the AP Stylebook and New Hart’s Rules
Typography and design: The Elements of Typographic Style
What I do with style guides
Most of the time, you’ll already have a guide and I edit your work to it. Let me know the one you need to follow, whether it’s a published manual or your company’s own house style, and I’ll hold every page to it, citations and reference list included. For most clients that means APA, Chicago, MLA, or AP. For medical and scientific work it’s the AMA Manual of Style. If you’ve built your own house style, I’ll follow that too.
If you don’t have a guide yet, I’ll build you one, or a shorter style sheet for a single project.
I’m Tara Foss, and I’ve spent 25+ years editing to style guides for researchers and businesses, so this is everyday work for me.
Editing to your style guide is part of my normal copy editing and proofreading. I don’t charge extra for it. To see what your project would cost, get an instant price.
Related reading
Proofreading, explained, what proofreading is and where it fits
Copy editing, explained, what copy editing covers
Non-fiction book editing, for books and manuscripts held to a house or series style
Common questions about style guides
Do I need a style guide?
Probably not, if you’re a small team writing side by side. You start to need one as you grow and bring more writers on board, especially in different places. That’s when a guide gets everyone to the same standard fast. A single big document, like a thesis or a major report, is worth a short style sheet on its own.
Can you create a style guide for me?
Yes. If you don’t have one, I’ll build you a full style guide, or a shorter style sheet for a single project. I start from how you already write and the standards you have to meet, so the guide fits the way you work. If a published guide would serve you better than a custom one, I’ll tell you that too.
Which style guide should I use?
Usually you don’t choose, your field or your publisher does. Psychology and the social sciences expect APA, the humanities use MLA, and book publishing and history lean on Chicago. Journalism uses AP, and medicine uses the AMA Manual of Style. If the call really is yours, go with whatever your readers already expect.
Whatever guide your work follows, I’ll apply it cleanly from your first page to your last. Tell me what you’re working on whenever you’re ready.