A style guide is a document that codifies the writing conventions for a publication, organization, or project — specifying how text should be structured, formatted, and voiced so that content from multiple authors reads as if it came from one.
Style guides are a genre in Carolyn Miller’s sense: they respond to a recurring situation (multiple people need to write consistently) with a typified form (rules for grammar, voice, terminology, formatting, and structure) [@miller1984]. They range from brief editorial checklists to comprehensive documents like the Chicago Manual of Style or the Microsoft Writing Style Guide.
A style guide typically covers:
- Voice and tone — whether the writing is formal or conversational, direct or hedged, personal or institutional.
- Grammar and mechanics — punctuation conventions, capitalization rules, number formatting, citation style.
- Terminology — which terms to use, which to avoid, and how to define technical vocabulary.
- Structure — how different content types (pages, sections, lists, headings) should be organized.
- Formatting — typographic and layout conventions.
Style guides serve content strategy by making consistency maintainable across authors and time. Without a style guide, each author makes their own choices about voice, structure, and terminology — producing content that’s internally consistent but collectively incoherent.
The vault’s own style guide is grounded in the rhetoric and composition research that informs the rest of the writing module. Its rules about active voice draw on Joseph Williams [@williams2006], its rules about readability draw on Rudolf Flesch [@flesch1949], and its content type conventions draw on genre theory.
The language and power topic examines the politics of style guides: every style guide encodes assumptions about whose language counts as standard, and those assumptions have consequences for writers whose linguistic backgrounds don’t match the guide’s norms. The vault’s style guide names itself as revisable for this reason — it draws on specific scholarly traditions that have their own blind spots.
Related terms
- content strategy — style guides are a tool for maintaining content consistency
- genre — the style guide itself is a genre; it also defines conventions for other genres
- official style — style guides can enforce or resist the Official Style
- plain language movement — plain language style guides operationalize the movement’s principles
- discourse community — style guides codify a discourse community’s conventions
- language and power — style guides encode power relations through language standards