GrammarPhile Blog

How to Develop Your In-House Style Guide

Posted by Sara Richmond   Aug 26, 2021 10:30:00 AM

An in-house style guide can take your life from VCR to VCR+. Despite its imposing name, creating and implementing an in-house style guide is a simple process.

First, go inside your house. A dog or chicken house will also work in a pinch. Next, put on the most fashionable thing you own. Even better: Put on many of the most fashionable things you own. Then, walk back outside and sashay down the sidewalk (bonus points if you drag a leash without an animal attached). Finally, record your neighbors’ reactions in real time and post them on social media for posterity.

Done.

If you prefer more specific and factual instructions, here are six quick tips on how to nail down a comprehensive and practical in-house style guide.

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Topics: style guide

How to Herd Cats Like a Pro (Part 2)

Posted by Terri Porter   May 20, 2015 4:30:00 AM

Last week, we talked about remedying the content and stylistic inconsistencies often found in large documents — specifically, the importance of getting a handle on how your final document should look before you begin writing. This week, we narrow the focus to talk about how to bridge the gap between your vision and the final product.

That’s where templates, style sheets and style guides come in handy. They allow you to create the stylistic elements you want and to apply them uniformly throughout the document to ensure unparalleled consistency. We provide an overview of these tools below, without detailing how to create them (online tutorials abound on how to create templates and style sheets in Word, and we’ll talk in a future post about how to develop your own style guide).

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Topics: style guide, style sheet, consistency in writing, templats

Headline Style -- Read All About It!

Posted by Phil Jamieson   Aug 24, 2010 4:30:00 AM

If you're in the newspaper business, you know how to properly capitalize headlines. But people writing white papers, press releases, brochures, and even résumés need to know what's right and what's wrong in order to retain the respect and admiration, to say nothing of the trust, of their readers. So take note!

Most style guides call for lower-casing prepositions, articles, and many conjunctions. But there are lots of extenuating circumstances that call for uppercasing those words sometimes. Read on, but first:

- A preposition is a word that could describe your relationship to a cloud: you're in the cloud, under the cloud, above the cloud, around the cloud, by the cloud, before the cloud, after the cloud. These italicized words are prepositions.
- The articles are the, a, and an -- they point out things: the boy, a man.
- Conjunctions join things: and, or, nor, while, etc.

The Chicago Manual of Style says to always capitalize the first and last words of a headline, no matter what. Lowercase prepositions, regardless of length, except when they are stressed (as through in A River Runs Through It), are used adverbially or adjectivally (as up in Look Up, down in Turn Down, on in The On Button, etc.), are used as conjunctions (such as before in Look Before You Leap), or are part of a Latin expression used adjectivally or adverbially (e.g., De Facto, In Vitro, etc.). CMS specifies lowercasing the conjunctions and, but, for, or, nor. Always lowercase to and as.

Examples:

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Topics: capitalization, conjunctions, preposition, style guide, Chicago Manual of Style, Gregg Reference Manual

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