What Makes a Great In-House Style Guide?

Honest Notes From a Contract Editor

By Allie Boman

If your organization publishes technical content regularly, you probably (hopefully?) have an in-house style guide. Or maybe you need one.

Often, these guides develop over time. Someone encounters an inconsistency, the editorial team makes a decision, and a new rule is born. In that sense, style guides can develop like municipal ordinances: Many of the rules exist because something happened that made everyone realize, “We need a policy for that.”

Other organizations rely almost entirely on an established style guide such as the Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS), APA Style (curated by the American Psychological Association), or Association Press (AP) Style. Using an established style guide has real advantages as they are updated regularly, have searchable online resources, and experienced editors may already know them well.

However, these guides aren’t designed specifically for your organization—you probably have areas where they don’t meet your needs. Thankfully, you don’t need to create an exhaustive list of every rule. Your in-house style guide can simply be an organized set of exceptions to a standard style guide. 

Your style guide may already exist, but how well is it serving you? Is it easy to navigate, polished, and up-to-date? A great in-house guide makes editorial work faster and more consistent. It’s an important piece of infrastructure for excellent publications. 

1. Organize the guide around how editors use it

The people who use this guide most are editors and proofreaders. (If you’ve been hoping your writers will use it…don’t. You have copyeditors for a reason.) 

Almost no one will read your style guide from beginning to end—maybe no one ever, except the proofreader of the guide itself. (More on that later.) Instead, people look up answers to specific questions.

Also important to realize: Contract and freelance editors are likely switching among several clients’ style guides. We may remember that your organization uses the Oxford comma, or that yours is the one that doesn’t, but we’re still going to double check.

That means your guide should be organized around the subjects and terms an editor is likely to search. The ones I look up most often include:

Numbers. Use a heading such as “Numbers” and include terms we'll search for: numerals, ordinals, percentages, dates, ranges, and so on.

Capitalization. Bring your capitalization rules together. Include titles, professional roles, program names, and any field-specific conventions.

Punctuation. As boring as it sounds, make sure you include the terms commas, dashes, hyphens, slashes, quotation marks, and other punctuation choices.

Abbreviations. Editors may need guidance on acronyms, initialisms, shortened organizational names, Latin abbreviations such as e.g. and i.e., and terms that should—or should not—be abbreviated.

Lists. When to use bullets or numbers, what symbols to use for sublevels, what style to use for in-text numbered lists vs. those formatted in a column. When to keep sentence punctuation and when to let it fly out the window.

References. Editors might also search for citations, bibliography, or sources. My best advice is to (please, please) identify a standard style guide (e.g., CMOS, APA) and list very few exceptions. You might note types of sources that are especially relevant for your organization or industry, such as citing industry standards or databases. 

Special elements. This includes anything that doesn’t behave like regular text: tables, figures, boxes, sidebars, equations, or appendices.Give the major ones (e.g., boxes, figures, tables, sidebars) their own sections. Repeat info that applies to more than one section. For example, if both tables and figures should use the % symbol instead of spelling out percent, put that rule in both sections. An editor who is working on a table may never think to look under “Figures” for a rule that applies to both.

Remember: a style guide is a reference tool, not a narrative document. Optimize it for retrieval.

2. Edit and proofread the style guide with rigor

This sounds obvious, but it is surprisingly common to find errors and inconsistencies inside style guides. Sometimes a guide says to follow a particular convention and then violates that convention in the very same paragraph. Other times it's less blatant but still problematic. 

For an editor, errors in a style guide create uncertainty, and we have to spend time making judgment calls. We assume that the style guide was well edited, so did we misunderstand something along the way? 

Your style guide should follow its own style—perfectly.

If your rule specifies an en dash for number ranges, use en dashes for number ranges throughout the guide. If you capitalize a particular term, capitalize it consistently. If you require the serial comma, use it in every applicable series in the guide.

The style guide is not just describing the standard, it’s demonstrating it, and it deserves more editorial attention than an ordinary internal document.

Every new version should receive both substantive editing and careful proofreading. When rules are added or changed, someone should also check if those changes create inconsistencies elsewhere in the document.

For research organizations in particular, this matters beyond aesthetics. The care reflected in a style guide reinforces the larger expectation that publications will be precise, internally consistent, and trustworthy.

3. Build an update-and-distribute process

A style guide is a living document. 

Language changes. Organizational terminology changes. Your publications change. Major external style guides release new editions and update their guidance. And your editorial team will inevitably encounter situations the existing guide doesn’t address.

So decide in advance how your guide will be maintained. For many organizations, an annual review is a helpful cadence.

Decide which roles should participate in the review: managing editor, other editorial staff, communications staff, and a subject matter expert or two. And include feedback from the people who use the guide regularly. Editors and proofreaders can usually tell you quickly where the guide is unclear.

During the review, consider:

• What questions have come up repeatedly during the past year?

• Are there rules that editors consistently have trouble finding?

• Have organizational terminology or publication types changed?

• Has your default external style guide (e.g., CMOS, APA) issued relevant updates?

• Are there inconsistencies or outdated examples in the guide?

Then address the step that is often forgotten: distribution.

A beautifully updated style guide does you little good if half your contributors are still using a version from 3 years ago.

Maintain a distribution list that includes everyone who needs the guide: staff editors, freelance and contract editors, proofreaders, writers, designers, and other staff responsible for producing publications.

Make the version unmistakable. Noting the year may be enough if you update annually. If updates are more frequent, use a quarter, month, or version number in the title.

The goal is simple: Anyone opening your style guide should be able to tell immediately whether they have the current version.

Ideally, maintain one clearly authoritative location for the current guide, such as an internal shared folder or a webpage. 

A style guide is part of your publication infrastructure

A thoughtful style guide makes editorial decisions faster. It ensures a large body of publications feels like the work of one organization. And, ultimately, it supports publication excellence.

For organizations communicating research to policymakers, practitioners, funders, or the public, careful editorial standards show respect for your audience. You’ve thought about the research and ideas you want to communicate, and about every detail that helps readers understand and trust them.

So if you’re evaluating your current in-house guide, start with three questions:

Can people quickly find what they need ?

Does the guide model the level of precision you expect from your publications?

Do you have a reliable process for keeping it current and getting the current version into people’s hands?

If the answer to all three is yes, you have much more than a list of style preferences. You have a useful piece of editorial infrastructure.

As you might have hoped, Boman Comms helps organizations develop style guides. Reach out if you’d like some help with this process.