ABOVE: The sixth edition of Style Manual (2008 reprint), the BRW style guide (5th edition, 2006) and Strunk and White’s ‘The Elements of Style’ (3rd edition,1979). It was first published in this form in 1959 from a guide written by Strunk in 1918.
Is your organisation ready to create a style guide? Here are some tips to make the process quicker and easier.
By Paula Ruzek, copy editor and proofreader (see my editing services and proofreading services)
A style guide is an essential part of professional and consistent production of important business documents, long reports, and especially publications for public consumption. This might be a government publication, an annual report, the local council’s newsletter to the community, a multi-volume tender response, or an annual magazine – both print and digital formats.
What is a style guide?
The English language has a lot of variations in issues such as spelling, capitalisation and punctuation style. A style guide’s purpose is to establish the agreed rules about which variations will be used consistently in a document or publication.
It may also set rules for issues such as organisational writing style, voice and tone, how to address its target audience, how to present the brand, and sometimes logo, typography and colour palette standards.
Style guides originated in printers’ shops in the 19th century and the early publishing houses. The typesetters (in the hot-metal days) and proofreaders created ‘style sheets’ to maintain consistency in spelling and punctuation across the books or manuscripts they were typesetting. They started simply, as one or a few pages, and today range in size from one A4 sheet to hundreds of pages.
Example of a one-page style guide (PDF, 807KB). In the early 2000s I was the copy editor on the ‘Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health’. This was its one-page style sheet.
Example of a magazine style guide (PDF, 1MB). I worked as a copy editor in the heyday of the print edition of the now-defunct ‘BRW’ (Business Review Weekly). This was its style guide at the time the Melbourne office closed in 2006.
Does your organisation need a style guide?
Your organisation needs a style guide if it:
- has a large website with lots of ever-changing text browsed by the public
- produces documents for public release
- produces documents (small to large) for clients
- creates multi-volume written tender response for major contracts
- has a regular publication of any type – newsletter, magazine, journal
- produces information of any type for public consumption.
No need to start from scratch
Creating a style guide can appear daunting. However, it doesn’t need to be. A lot of the work has already been done by existing style guides. Australia has two excellent places to start.
- The Australian Government Style Manual, usually just known as the Style Manual. Now online, it was originally published as a book with a printing history going back to 1966. I still have a treasured copy of the sixth edition (2002), reprinted in 2008. It’s 550 densely packed pages that are a joy to browse. As a book, it’s only available these days in university and state libraries. The online version is excellent and free to access. It is well organised and regularly maintained, keeping up with changes in Australian English. Although it is aimed at “everyone who writes, edits or approves Australian Government content”, it has been the primary standard in Australia since it began.
- The Australian Style Guide™, published by the Plain English Foundation. The foundation is a commercial organisation that offers language-related services, but access to its style guide is free. It, too, is well organised and maintained. It is aimed at Australian writers and editors, communication specialists, professionals writing at work, and students and academics.
Creating your own style guide
An organisation can shortcut its style guide development by selecting one of the two sources above and adopting it for all the many generic issues of style – and there are lots of them. You won’t realise how many until you read one of the guides. Some of the most common ones are:
- capitalisation (a huge area)
- numbers presentation (one, two, three or 1, 2, 3, money, measurement, dates, times, years/year spreads, etc.)
- spelling preferences (including -our/-or, -ise/-ize and so many more)
- list/bullet point punctuation (there are several types)
- dashes and hyphens
- reference style (author–date [Harvard], documentary–note, legal [Australian Guide to Legal Citation], various academic styles)
- heading style (title case, sentence case, all caps).
From generic to specific styles
Beyond generic issues, the most important part of your style guide will be making specific decisions about your organisation and its industry. For example:
- How do you refer to your organisation? Name in full then an acronym or shortform? Full name all the time?
- What about the Board? Is it ‘the Board’ or ‘the board’? Chairman, Chair, Chairwoman, Chairperson, caps or no caps?
- Do you capitalise the name of departments, e.g. Finance Department, but not offices within the department, e.g. payroll office?
- Do you capitalise position titles when attached to a person’s name, e.g. marketing manager or Marketing Manager?
- Is the organisation always an ‘it’, or at times are we comfortable using ‘we’ and ‘our’ to personalise language, even if it is not strictly grammatical?
- What will we designate as proper nouns, which attract capital letter presentation, and what are generic nouns? Is it Strategic Plan 2026–2030 or strategic plan 2026–2030?
- In what instances do you use italic and bold in text? (Italic is often reserved for the names of acts of parliament, book and film titles, and other published works.)
- Consider how many common industry terms you use and how they will be capitalised, hyphenated and spelt.
You won’t address everything in the first edition of your style guide; they are always a work in progress as new issues will arise. It is important that regular updates are made to address questions or the style guide will lose its potency.
Consider also what size style guide you need to start with. Do you start with one page and build or do you need something more substantial? (See examples above.)
Select a dictionary for spelling and hyphenation
Dictionaries in book form are dead for writing, editing and proofreading in the digital age. They are too slow and cumbersome for constant referencing.
The Macquarie Dictionary Online is the standard for Australian English. It has dictionary and thesaurus functions and is easy to use. For organisations where staff do a lot of writing as part of their work, it’s worth taking out an organisational subscription so everyone can have access. Individual subscriptions are available for $99 a year (August 2026).
Use the Macquarie as the default spelling standard for words that are not in the style guide. Whatever the Macquarie lists first in its spelling of a word, that’s the spelling you use. Hyphenation of words can also be a contentious issue – is it deep-dive, deep dive or deepdive? Let the Macquarie be the final arbiter. (It’s deep dive.)
Some might prefer the Australian Oxford Dictionary, but it does not appear to have an online edition comparable to the Macquarie. The main Oxford English Dictionary site is aimed at the academic market and is a fascinating source for fans of the language’s history and origins.
A style guide takes persistence
Creating and maintaining a style guide takes persistence and dedication. It needs a person – preferably a few people – who love the language and are detail oriented. The style guide must be regularly updated with answers to all those questions that people ask. It must also be enforced throughout the writing population of the organisation to remain an effective asset that helps create professional, first-class written material that makes the organisation proud.