How to Create Your Own Personal Writing Style Guide
Tags: Work, Writing Tips, Productivity, Grammar, Writing

How to Create Your Own Personal Writing Style Guide

Making your life as a professional writer a little easier.

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

In my last article, I talked about why style guides were important and how to choose the best one for your needs. Today, however, I want to show you how you can make your own style guide, suited to your specific needs as a writer.

Why

Why would you want to create your own style guide? Well, as handy as the mass market style guides are, they are slanted to certain broadly-defined groups: Chicago to journalists, MLA to academics, and APA to people in the social sciences.

But what if you belong to none of these? What if you write strictly experimental fiction, sci-fi or fantasy? If you do a lot of worldbuilding or you, say, create a new language for your characters, then a conventional style guide isn’t going to help you much.

Likewise, if you write in a specific nonfiction niche like history (or historical fiction), you’ll want to keep track of key dates and details that consistently color your work. If you work in a scientific specialty that has a lot of its own terminology (e.g. environment, physics, or mathematics), a style guide that includes spellings, principles, references, and equation formatting means that the references you need are at your fingertips, and that you use them in a consistent manner each time you write a piece.

What

So, what should go into your style guide? In addition to some of the things I’ve already mentioned, you can have a section for character names that you’ve created along with their spellings and meanings. Every time you create a new world, you should create a new style guide to go along with it.

Add details like geography, topography, cultural norms, languages, currencies, social structure, flora and fauna, and more. Keeping such details constant throughout the book(s) is something your readers expect. Try not to mess it up!

Nonfiction writers will find it helpful to add terminology that you use frequently to a themed dictionary; doing this will keep you from having to constantly tell your word crunching software that, yes, this is a real word and this is how it’s spelled.

Where

This is probably the toughest part of the process. If your style guide isn’t too complicated you can make a simple Google or Word document on your computer — or a notebook, if you’re old school, like me.

It would be best to have separate sections for different topics: all names together, all jargon together, worldbuilding details together, formulas together, etc. If your document is more than 5 or 10 pages, you’re going to want to come up with a better system of organizing the material or you’re never going to be able to find anything when you need it.

The best approach for analog (i.e. non-tech) people is a large ring-binder with section dividers that you can easily rearrange and add more paper to as your style guide gets more complex. If you’re writing fiction, I suggest using a new notebook or binder for each book so you don’t mix up the details from one into another. If all of your novels take place in the same world, you can have a “master” style guide, with separate smaller notebooks for each new novel.

If you’re into technology, there are a number of programs that can help organize your style guide online. Trello is a project management app that’s easy for beginners to learn with strong basic features like idea grouping, change tracking, and calendar organization. Asana is similar, with an intuitive interface and fewer features than Trello.

Here is a list of ten different project tracking apps in this comprehensive article by the financial gurus at The Motley Fool (see the sidebar in that article). Writing programs and apps made specifically for plotting and novel organization can be helpful for fiction writers. Scrivener is a highly detailed software package for writers with nearly endless capabilities, but a steep learning curve.

If you want something similar but easier, Dabble is a great choice that allows you the organizing capabilities of Scrivener without the headaches. Note-taking apps like Evernote, Milanote, and OneNote are basic online notebooks, while Scribus makes arranging layouts of your notes a breeze.

Here’s a list of ten top apps for writers, courtesy of top tech magazine PCMag.

Even standard word processing software like Word and Google Docs can be used to arrange lists of words and names in alphabetical order, create basic charts and tables, track changes to your style guide, and sort pages in a specific order. If you are unsure of your needs, try starting with a simple document first and then expand it as you go if necessary.

How

It’s probably easiest to begin with the list of “errors” that your current software editor keeps red-lining. Technical jargon, proper nouns, unusual spellings, and foreign words are frequent stumbling blocks for standard programs. Start by adding these exceptions to the dictionary that comes with the software package. This is typically accomplished by right-clicking on the highlighted word and then scrolling down to “add to dictionary” in the menu.

Word has the ability to store specialized formatting needs for journals or science-based articles under the “References” tab on the taskbar. “Insert” makes adding headers, footers, and specialty text simple, while “Find and Replace” makes it easy to swap out specific terms for generic words. Sometimes, using this feature is easier than typing ‘diethylamino hydroxybenzoyl hexyl benzoate’ fifteen times in an article. Don’t ask me how I know this.

Google Docs and Storyist (for Macs) as well as other writing programs have these same abilities; the names and steps may vary a bit.

Whatever method you choose, creating your own style guide can make your writing process quicker and more error-free. And isn’t that what we aspire to as professional writers?

Here’s your choice of my free guides: writing, personal improvement, or the environment.

DRM is an award-winning author and the publisher of What to do About…Everything, and Boomer: Unfiltered. She writes in science, writing, mental health, and the environment on A Writer’s Mind.