Style manuals, or style guides (I use the terms interchangeably), are a set of standards. They help us keep our writing and formatting consistent by establishing universal styles. Two well-known examples are The Associated Press Stylebook and The Chicago Manual of Style. Serious writers should own one or both of these superb books.

But it’s also an excellent idea to develop your own personalized style guide. That’s because you’ll inevitably come across situations that generalized style manuals don’t cover. You need to remain consistent in your style, and your personal style manual will help you do that.

What do style manuals cover?

The Associated Press Stylebook covers capitalization, number use, acronyms, titles, and much more. There are more detailed entries for the military, academia, business, sports, media law, punctuation, and again much more.

Here is a partial sample entry for Marines from The Associated Press Stylebook (the AP italicizes both correct and incorrect examples):

“Capitalize [Marines] when referring to the U.S. forces: the U.S. Marines . . .Do not use the abbreviation USMC . . . Do not describe Marines as soldiers . . .”

Style guides also serve as useful reference tools. Say you’re unfamiliar with the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashana. The AP Stylebook defines it. They also tell us how to spell easy-to-misspell words. As an example, is the apparatus on playgrounds a merry-go-round or a merry go round? The AP says it’s the former.

Why you need a personal style manual

Anyone who’s written a document more than a few paragraphs long has had to scroll back to recall if, for example, they’ve written chapter titles like this:

                 Chapter One
     The First Chapter of my Book

or like this:

     Chapter One: The First Chapter of my Book

If you’re in that group, then you know how useful a personal style manual can be. The very act of writing your manual and defining your preferences will help you remember your preferred format.

Another reason to develop your own style manual is that established manuals sometimes differ. For example, The Associated Press Stylebook says book titles should be in quotation marks, but The Chicago Manual of Style says they should be italicized.” Neither is right nor wrong, but you’ll need to decide which one you want to adhere to. Putting disputed entries in your personal manual resolves the issue for you.

You’re free to violate established, but non-critical rules, in your personal style manual. For example, I once worked at the web site of a large, well-regarded news organization in the Tampa Bay, Florida area. Our in-house manual included our preferred way of referring to our geographical location when we didn’t want to write “Tampa Bay.” We wrote “the Bay area.” That was technically incorrect. Bay should not have been capitalized because it’s not a formal name. But our choice was to capitalize it, and that was fine, again, as long as we were consistent, and our style manual helped us achieve that goal.

If your job requires extensive writing, I’d also suggest establishing an in-house style manual so all writers are, quite literally, on the same page.

You don’t have to compose a style manual before you start writing. Indeed, you’re better off adding entries as you decide how you’ll handle them.