Last session, we had our table of contents all planned out, and we created our Subject Matter Thesaurus. Now, we're ready for the second meta-document: the style guide.

Style guides are common in the publishing industry. Every magazine and publishing house (well, every one with a clue what it's doing) has its own house style guide. It's the document that tells you whether they use single quotations or double for speech, which numbers are writtin in words or digits, whether split infinitives and dangling participles are allowed, and how long your paragraphs should be.

Style guides come in two parts: the house style, and the project-specific vocabulary. If the latter sounds a lot like what we did last week - it's similar. But it has a very different purpose, and you'll see why I suggest you do the thesaurus first in a moment.

Vocabulary vs thesaurus

To recap: your thesaurus is designed to enforce consistency of terminology - one concept per term, one term per concept. It tells you what word to use when you're trying to describe a particular action or idea, and provides a quick lookup of any approximate words that you might be thinking of - 'select' or 'press' for 'click', for example.

Your style guide vocabulary is designed to enforce consistency of style. That is, when you use the word 'left-click', you always use it the same way - all letters lower case (unless at the start of a sentence), a hyphen in the middle, and no additional font features like italics or bold. This consistently gives your reader confidence that your term means the same thing as it did four pages ago.

While you can, in theory, wrap this concept into your thesaurus by ensuring all entries are written as you will use them, your vocabulary also includes words you're not likely to find in your thesaurus, because they're matters of style rather than meaning - for example, if your project is likely to include words that have an American alternate spelling, you list which version you're using in the vocab. Colour, for example, or judgement, or behaviour. These words, unless they have a subject-specific meaning, don't belong in your thesaurus, but you do need a notation of which version you're using.

This is why the thesaurus is usually constructed first - because it forms a subset of the vocabulary. Additionally, it's much easier to create a consistent style when you have everything you're going to work with.

How to build a style guide

Your style guide consists of three main sections:

• Vocabulary and spelling
• Numbers and punctuation
• Styling

The following guidelines represent the areas I usually cover when creating a style guide. They're by no means exhaustive - usually, I end up adding several project specific areas. But they cover the basics, and will give you an idea:

Vocabulary and spelling

1. Open a word processor and create a table 3 across by 11 down.
2. Merge the top row into one big cell, and type "General guidelines:" followed by what typical guidelines you will use, for example, whether you will use American spelling, what dictionary you will use, and what default style guide the writer should fall back on. My standard declaration is:
   • Standard Australian spelling applies.
   • Use -ise and -our endings over -ize and -or.
   • Retain the mute 'e' in judgement and acknowledgement.
   • Refer to the Macquarie Dictionary and Australian Style Manual for anything not covered in this document.
3. Merge the second row into one big cell, and type "0-9". Leave a blank line.
   • In this cell, you'll list all vocabulary terms that begin with a number (eg "007" if you were writing a James Bond feature)
4. In the first cell of the third row, type 'A'. In the next call across, type 'B'. In the last call, type 'C'.
5. Continue listing the alphabet, one letter per cell. You'll have one left over; don't worry about it.
6. Write your vocabulary terms in the corresponding boxes: ensure you write the terms exactly as they would appear if used mid-sentence (you may need to turn off any auto-correct features to stop the program capitalising all your words).

 Numbers and punctuation

You can structure this section as a table, or as a series of paragraphs. Personally, I prefer a table to keep things neat: I find it easier to read, but it makes little different if you choose a paragraph-style. You'll need to make decisions about the following areas:

• Abbreviations, acronyms and contractions : which will have periods and where.
• Dashes and hyphens : when will you use hyphens, and what hyphenation style will you follow
• Dates and times : how will they be represented (eg "Always use numbers for time - 7pm, 10:30am")
• Lists : how will you structure punctuation in your lists (eg each element a full sentence, whole list a full sentence)
• Numbers : when will you use digits and words (eg
  • "numbers below twenty will be rendered in words.
  • Indefinite numbers such as "about a hundred" shall be rendered in words.
  • Units of measurement shall be rendered in digits.
  • Numbers greater than 999 shall have a comma after the thousands figure")
• Paragraphs : what's the minimum and maximum number of lines?
• Quotations : will you use single or double quotes for quotation? How will you handle:
  • in-quotation punctuation,
  • quotations that form a full sentence,
  • quotations interpolated with speech tags,
  • quotations that end a sentence,
  • quotations that contain punctuation that violates your style guide.

Styling

Once again, this section can be structured however you like - I prefer tables, again. Some people prefer to interpolate it with their punctuation and numbers section above, but I find it better to separate line editing from style - the two aren't really related, as this section is much more about how your word processor styles will be formatted, and what styles will be used for what type of text. For a basic style template, you'll need to cover:

• Body or paragraph styles - typically one without a first-line indent, for opening paragraphs, and one with a first-line indent for subsequent paras. You'll need to edecide what font-face you're using (Sans serif for screen-reading, serif for print), what size and weight, colour (if any), leading (the space between the lines) and kerning (the space between the letters).
  • don't use line-spaces between paragrphs in place of indenting- this is considered a rookie move by most professionals.
• Heading styles - you'll need to define styles for at least three levels, including the fontfact, size, colour, leading and kerning. Keep them consistent with each other - don't have four different fontfaces in there - but make it easy for a reader to see what level of heading they're looking at.
• List styles - levels of indentation, bullet-style
• Cross references - how will you indicate a cross reference
• Hyperlinks - how will hyperlinks be formatted? It's usually best to keep the underline of a traditional like, otherwise your reader may not be aware it's a link, and it should be a different colour to the body text for the same reason - that doesn't mean you have to keep that lurid default blue, though.
• Tables - what borders and table decoration will you have? Will you have table headers and row headers - and will these have different font styles, or background colours? Will your table font size be different?
• Images - what size will your images be, what positions will they be allowed to take in the text, will text be flowed around the image, or will the image interrupt the paragraph?
• Key terms - will you treat key terms a special way, eg bold them so the reader can pick them out easily?
• Titles - will your titles be small caps (generally harder to read, but dramatic) title case (often winds up looking silly, in my opinion) or sentence case?

That gives you a basic style guide. It looks like a lot of work, but remember most of that can be borrowed for your next project. Anf if you maintain a global style guide and thesaurus as you go, adding in rules as you require them, each project will require successively less work on the meta-documents - you'll just add in the handful of project-specific terms and styles, and you're ready.