How to build a personal style guide

Every time you write, you make several dozen small decisions that have no right answer: email or e-mail, 5% or five per cent, the Oxford comma or not, whether headings take sentence case. Made fresh each time, they come out differently, and the inconsistency is visible to readers even when they cannot name it.

A personal style guide is the record of those decisions. It takes an hour to start and saves you from relitigating the same question for the rest of your working life.

What goes in it

Variety of English. US, UK, Australian, Canadian. Then the sub-decisions: -ise or -ize, and whether you follow a specific dictionary. Naming a dictionary settles hundreds of future questions in one line.

Punctuation. Oxford comma or not. Single or double quotation marks, and whether punctuation goes inside or outside. Em dashes with or without spaces. Ellipses. Whether you use semicolons at all.

Numbers. Where the numeral/word threshold sits (ten and under in words is common). Percentages, currency, dates, times, ranges, large numbers.

Capitalisation. Headings in sentence case or title case. Job titles. Product names. Whether you capitalise after a colon.

Abbreviations. e.g. and i.e. with or without stops. Whether you spell out an acronym on first use. Which ones never need it.

Formatting. Bold and italics — what each is for. Bullet lists: capitalised or not, full stops or not. Heading levels. Link text conventions.

Names and terms. The exact spelling and casing of things you write about often. This is where most inconsistency lives.

Voice. Contractions allowed or not. First or second person. Words you will not use — your own cliché list.

Inclusive language. Your conventions for gender-neutral phrasing, disability language, nationality and ethnicity terms, and how you handle the singular they.

How to build it

Do not write it from scratch. Two better routes:

Adopt a base and record only your deviations. Pick an established guide — AP, Chicago, the Guardian or Economist style guides, or your discipline's standard — and write down only where you differ. Your document stays one page, and every unlisted question has an answer.

Harvest from your own past work. Take three or four recent pieces and note every place you were inconsistent with yourself. That list is your first draft, and it is more useful than any generic template because it addresses the decisions you actually waver on.

Keeping it usable

One page. A style guide nobody reads is a filing exercise. If it grows past two pages, split it into a one-page core plus an alphabetical word list.

Alphabetical word list at the end. This is the part you will use most: the running A–Z of terms you have settled — ebook, email, internet, website, ongoing, per cent, the Sixties. Add to it whenever you hesitate.

Record the decision, not the reasoning. You are not writing an argument. "Oxford comma: yes" is the entry.

Keep it where you write, not in a folder. A pinned note or a document you can search in two seconds.

Enforcing it

Set your spellchecker to the right variety — this is the single highest-value action and most people never do it.

Build a find-and-replace list for your habitual slips. If you always type "alot" or waver between "healthcare" and "health care", a two-minute pass catches them.

Do a dedicated consistency pass at the end, separately from proofreading. Search for your known trouble terms one at a time. It is dull and it is fast, and it catches what reading never will.

Common mistakes

Writing thirty pages nobody consults. Copying a corporate style guide wholesale, most of which does not apply to you. Recording rules you already follow instinctively — only write down what you get wrong. Never updating it. Applying it retroactively across everything you have ever written instead of from now on. Treating it as correctness: these are conventions, and the point is consistency, not virtue.

Practical tips

• Start with ten entries today. Add one every time you pause over a choice.
• Note the date you set each convention; some will change and you will want to know which pieces predate the change.
• If you write for clients or publications, keep their style sheet alongside yours and note the conflicts.
• Share it with anyone who edits you. Most of what editors change is style, not error.