A Guide Through Style Guides

Along with a well-oiled office chair and a trusty version of Antidote, style guides are indispensable tools for any editorial professional. Antidote’s own language resources reference them with abandon when unpacking thorny or fine-grained issues in English typography, spelling or punctuation: “Some style guides recommend writing BC, AD, BCE and CE in small caps,” for example. But who or what are these “guides”, and why do we invoke them so much?

This instalment of Language Matters charts a course through style guides, bringing into relief what they are, what they do, and how they make life much easier for those writing in English.

What Are Style Guides?

Right off the bat, it helps to parse some concepts because the term style guide creaks under the weight of contested interpretations. There are confusions with both style and guide.

Strictly speaking, style concerns matters of mechanics, that is, the visual and technical conventions of text: how to use spacing, how to render punctuation, how to spell and capitalize words, etc. Conventions is the key word: These traits are largely susceptible to preference, interpretation or regional norms—a matter of style, if you will. Style does not typically include grammar, which is more prescriptive on the rules governing the inflected form and structural order of words. Grammar instruction is more the purview of grammars, or English or linguistics textbooks with a range of descriptive or prescriptive bents. Most style guides include select reminders of standard grammatical correctness.

Some guides employ the word usage along with or in lieu of style. Usage is another airy word whose meaning gets foggy. Formally, usage typically refers to how words and phrases are used, whether or not they adhere to definitional precision. You may wince when someone says that they literally (not figuratively) exploded with laughter, and a publication may forbid that usage as well. The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage is thus concerned with both conventions of mechanics and the precision of vocabulary. Again, most style guides clarify desired uses of words, folding what is technically usage into the broader scope of style.

Opinions are also split as to what constitutes a guide as opposed to other resources. Without traipsing too far into the semantic weeds, the breakdown below teases out differences among terms that tend to collide when discussing the objects commonly known as “style guides”. Caveat: Like style conventions themselves, these descriptions are not written in stone.

Style guides — At their essence, style guides are sets of guidelines (of whatever form) that list and explain desired style conventions for published texts. As noted above, some style guides warn against common grammatical slip-ups and misused vocabulary, but this is usually secondary to the goal of applying editorial consistency across a range of conventions.

In-house or house style guides — These are style guides that are particular to an organization or publisher, and are likely created by an in-house editor or a communications or marketing team. They include institution-specific entries that would not typically be listed in other guides, such as how to style a company’s slogan. For matters outside their purview, they refer users to larger guides.

Style manuals and stylebooks — These book-length texts tend to also take the name style guide, but some people make the distinction that they are larger than guides and supply comprehensive coverage of English usage or industry-specific stylings. They are usually published by professional organizations and are revised and expanded every decade or so. Manuals may go into detail on matters outside of language or style, such as manuscript preparation or copyright concerns. The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) and the MLA (Modern Language Association) Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing are examples. Stylebooks are usually desk references published by media organizations for journalists or other professionals who need quick confirmation of stylings. They usually take the form of alphabetical lists of proper nouns, words with nuanced semantics, or entry words for subject categories (“company names”). Examples include The Canadian Press Stylebook and The Associated Press Stylebook.

Style sheets — Often no more than a page, these are compiled on the fly for a specific project or series of projects when there is no default style guide, or when a project intentionally departs from a guide’s conventions. As such, entries on style sheets might be more idiosyncratic than those of larger guides.

Academic style or citation guides — These provide conventions for manuscript formatting and source documentation in academic publishing. Different disciplines favour different guides. In North America, humanities scholarship uses the MLA Handbook, while social and behavioural sciences follow the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA). The Chicago Manual of Style has its own citation style, sometimes called “Chicago style” or “Turabian style”, which also sees use in academia. Each style prescribes different ways of presenting and citing references, but they tend not to diverge greatly in other conventions.

Inclusive language and accessibility guides — These guides have gained traction in recent years in step with conversations around diversity, equity and inclusion. Inclusive language guides list potentially problematic language and offer alternative phrasings with the goal of reducing alienation, inaccuracies, bias or stigma. The online GLAAD Media Reference Guide, aimed at fairly representing LGBTQ people, is one example. Web accessibility guides, meanwhile, detail how to make online content as user-friendly as possible for everyone. Many conventional style guides offer guidance on inclusive language or web accessibility too, or they provide links to dedicated resources.

What’s in a Typical Style Guide?

Style guides are living documents and can be highly specific to an organization, a department or even a project. They represent a series of professionally informed guidelines or institutional stylings rather than strict, universal rules. Keeping in mind the variant forms discussed earlier, the table below presents example entries of a typical style guide (or a combination of them).

Why Use a Style Guide?

Style guides have a degree of prominence in the English language, which has no official body that prescribes or promotes its usage. The rules and stylings of English are thus less codified by language regulators than is the case in French, for example, which can look to the Office québécois de la langue française in Quebec and the Académie française in France. Authorities on English are diffused among various language resources, including style guides.

The use of style guides touches several domains of English writing. Students are often asked by professors (and professors are often asked by publishers) to follow particular styles. Job ads for editorial work frequently list as an asset the familiarity with one or more major style guides. For freelance writers, copyeditors and proofreaders, who may switch between multiple projects in the span of a day, style guides are lifesavers. Within professional industries spanning multiple geographic regions, style guides ensure much-needed uniformity.

As for how they impact daily work, style guides bring certainty to common pitfalls and consistency to project specifications, saving untold time and energy otherwise spent rummaging for answers. A bleary-eyed proofreader sweating out a tight deadline has no greater friend than a well-tended guide. They have become standard in many workplaces, as clear and consistent application of editorial style emits an aura of professionalism and care. It also rallies workers around common messaging, adding to a brand’s staying power in the minds of consumers. For more on brand voice messaging from a linguistic angle, see our Language Matters article Tuning Your Voice: Trends in Brand Language.

As previewed earlier in the note about inclusive language, style guides also carve out space for rethinking or refining ways of writing about others. Advocates concerned with problematic language have started publishing guides that promote phrasings favoured by members of identity groups. One example in this vein is Gregory Younging’s Elements of Indigenous Style, an Indigenous-led resource on culturally respectful vocabulary when writing about Indigenous peoples. Other contemporary style guides focus on inclusive language writ large, pointing out nomenclature that may offend or demean others.

Major Style Guides for English

North America

United Kingdom

Anyone can build their own style guide, and Antidote can help. To learn how, visit the Customizations section of our user guide and see our personal dictionaries and custom rules in action.

This article was concocted by

Antidote’s linguists