The Writer-Editor Relationship: What is a Style Guide?

When talking to an editor, you might feel like you need to get everything “right” the first time, that your messages need to be free from grammatical errors, or that you’re in for a lecture/sea of red pen. 

Some of us might be more persnickety than others, but on the whole, we’re nerds who are here and excited to help you.

You might already know what a style guide is, and if you do, this will be review. Purposeful Prose is fortunate to be working with a guest writer for our purposes, and we recently completed their sample edit. 

One of their questions, after the sample edit, concerned style guide usage. 

Style guides are tools that help writers, editors, and anybody who works with the written word maintain a consistent set of standards in terms of tone and style, grammar and mechanics, and formatting. A style guide helps people to make stylistic choices about a text, and it helps any team working on the same text to collaborate with one another. 

When Purposeful Prose is working with an organization, one of our first questions usually is, “Does your organization have a house style guide?” 

A published text, whether online or print, for a business is usually concerned about brand recognition and, often, legal/medical compliance. A house style guide is usually based on an existing, common style guide with some differences. 

This helps the organization to maintain a consistent, familiar voice that their customers will recognize and maintain accuracy and compliance with any regulations. 

Individual writers publishing books, short stories, or even blogs aren’t too different. 

If a writer is working with a platform or company to publish their work, there will be regulations and limits on what can be published. Some of those regulations are more lax than others. Pair those with a style guide to help you (or you and an editor) to evaluate your work, and you’ll have the tools that will help you produce high-quality, polished, and consistent written work. 

Let’s look at a few examples of common style guides your editor might use:

American Psychological Association (APA)

This style guide is usually used for texts on psychology and the social sciences, but some people prefer using the formatting guidelines for this style guide in their fiction or nonfiction!

Associated Press (AP)

Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS)

Modern Language Association (MLA)

Usually, these style guides cover similar information, but they’ll have different guidelines depending on what you’re writing.

As a writer, do I need to know all this?

Knowing the basics of some style guides can help you, especially if you’re looking to publish. They’re a great reference to have, but don’t worry about memorizing them! 

If you’re an editor, why do you need a style guide?

Every style guide has slightly different formatting guidelines, citation guidelines, even some different grammatical guidelines! 

Editors are collaborators, and we want to make sure that the writers we work with are following the guidelines that will help them find success in the place they choose to publish. Style guides help us to be our best collaborative selves and, as writers, they can give you more information about the choices we make. 

Do we have to follow all of these rules all the time?

Nope! A lot of publications don’t. Style guides are guides, not absolute rules. They’ll help us to be consistent, compliant with publishers, and they’ll help us acknowledge our sources properly. 

They aren’t fixed rules for how you have to write. They’re just helpers in a process that will help us to make things easier. 

How We Use Style Guides

The subject of style guides came up with our guest writer on a short paragraph in their piece. Their work references the titles in other works, and we wanted to make sure that the titles were formatted correctly. We brought up style guides, and Purposeful Prose recommended APA, which our guest writer agreed with after asking us more about style guides and how we’re using them.

“It took playing through a copy of Pokémon Let’s Go Eevee! to trigger a memory I haven’t had in years. I had my mix CDs and my full albums in the passenger seat of my mother’s Nissan on my way upstate to visit my grandparents.”

Notice how the title of the video game is italicized. That’s correct for APA and most style guides. Titles of chapters, articles, or parts within a work would be in quotation marks. 

So, why did we choose APA out of all the other style guides? APA was our recommendation for a few reasons. The citation guidelines, in case we need to use them, are concise, focusing on the year of publication. We probably won’t need citations for this, but we’ll keep it in our back pocket just in case.

This is more of a think piece. We want to be reader-friendly, and APA is well-suited to the format that we’ve chosen. While it’s likely that we won’t follow every guideline to the letter, we’ll use APA as a reference in case we need to make specific choices relating to style and need some help in our conversations. 

Purposeful Prose is so excited to welcome our guest writer and their project! If you have any questions about style guides or any part of our process, contact us. We can’t wait to read what you’ve written.