How to Create Your Own Writer’s Style Guide
And why you should.
I learned about style guides in the late 1990s when I was a baby newspaper reporter in the actual Armpit of America.
A style guide is simply a book full of writing rules. Do you write out numbers or use numerals? Is there a period after Dr? Should we use an Oxford comma?
That sort of thing. As a journalist, I used the AP (or Associated Press) Style Guide. My editor gave me a copy my first day on the job. As a student, I used the MLA (or Modern Language Association) style guide.
As a novelist? I mostly use my very own personalized style guide.
This was one of the coolest things about being published by Penguin.
I won’t sit here and try to convince you that there weren’t a ton of cool things about having my first novel published. There were. Obvs.
But one of the coolest and, arguably, the one that’s helped me the most over the last ten years, was being presented with a personalized…
