Anyone who has worked as an editor or copy editor at a news organization should be familiar with style guides. Publishers use them as well. Below, I am sharing the style guide I developed for my own publishing company. It’s a work in progress and is updated and refined every year. It’s absolutely critical for maintaining continuity across the award-winning IN 30 MINUTES series of guides, especially as other editors, copy editors, and proofreaders get involved. I sometimes share parts of it with authors, too.
As a former news and technology journalist, I was very familiar with style guides including AP Style and in-house style guides used by the trade magazines Network World (where I served as a copy editor from 1999-2002) and Computerworld (new media editor, 2005-2008). As managing editor of The Industry Standard in its final online incarnation (2008-2010), I created my own style guide (based heavily upon my Computerworld experience) which I distributed to my writers and editors.
I also am familiar with academic style guides. The Chicago Manual of Style was required reading for master’s candidates at the Harvard Extension School, and I had to follow it (and the Extension School’s in-house formatting guide) closely for my history thesis to be approved.
My style guide is nowhere near as detailed as Chicago or AP Style, or even the Network World style guide which had hundreds of technical acronyms. The IN 30 MINUTES style guide is designed to be a quick reference for small teams led by me, not a definitive text used by millions of people at countless organizations of all sizes.
Work on the IN 30 MINUTES style guide started in 2012. It does not focus on “voice” and includes some technical notes relating to versioning and software preferences. It’s broken up into several main areas (manuscript, punctuation, image references, terminology, etc.) and veers between general advice and specific details that are important to a consistent reader experience and less stress for editors and designers.
Style guide for In 30 Minutes (2021)
Manuscripts
- Use Microsoft Word desktop version (Windows or Mac) when submitting a manuscript or editing a manuscript, unless lead editor makes other arrangements. Make sure the correct version of the document is submitted.
- Once an author submits a manuscript to an editor for review (usually via email, sometimes via the cloud), do not make any further changes to the document until the editor has read it through, made changes/comments, and responded to the author with next steps.
- Do not import existing Word manuscripts to Google Docs, Scrivener, text editors, or any other word processing program for any reason. This removes important information from the file, including index codes, tracking, and some formatting.
- When working in a shared editing situation with multiple people (with the file in Dropbox), do not make a working copy of the manuscript file, or open it in any other program except the most recent desktop version of Microsoft Word for Windows or macOS. You can make a backup copy, but please keep it in a separate folder of your own and do not make any updates in the backup file, only the main working manuscript that everyone is using.
- Try not to open the document if you believe someone else is working on it at that time … this can cause problems including forked versions lost/overwritten edits.
- Use MS Word’s commenting features if you have questions about specific aspects of the document, or are leaving a note about an image that needs to be replaced – e.g,. “Replace with ‘word 365 home ribbon NEW.jpg'”
Image references
- Images include photos, screenshots, stock photography, and diagrams.
- Do not import images to the Word document. Instead, leave a text reference as described below.
- For any screenshots, expand the window to the full size of the screen (external monitor preferred). The editor or designer may crop later. The goal is to get as high-quality a screenshot as possible with as much detail as possible. Close-ups are better for content in the editing window or browser window.
- For desktop applications, it is not possible to zoom in on the interface elements (such as the Microsoft ribbon) but you will be able to zoom into the editing screen as well as browser windows.
- If you create a screenshot or source an image, drop a copy in a shared Dropbox folder or Dropbox chapter subfolder. Use a name that includes information about the contents (“annotated thyroid diagram updated.png” or “c1 backstage view windows new.png”)
- Text pointers to images: in the text of the manuscript on its own line, type the following between paragraphs where the image should be placed using brackets and IMG and the name of the file if applicable, e.g.
[IMG diagram of thyroid nodule goes here]
[IMG “powerpoint 365 animations tab.PNG”]
- For replacing images in new editions of books, don’t delete the existing image that will be visible in the Word doc. Instead, highlight the image, click the Word “add comment” tool on the Review tab in Word, and include the note “Replace with xxxx.png”
Punctuation
- Em dash – remove spaces before and after (started this in 2016). Treat the first word after an em dash the same way you’d treat it if it followed a comma.
- Curly quotes and apostrophes, including in subsection headers. Do not use straight quotes aka “dumb quotes”
- Do not use quotation marks around text describing a feature on the screen unless it’s something that’s too long or confusing (e.g. click the “X” on the pop-up prompt)
- Colons: only cap if phrase following colon could exist as a standalone sentence. For instance, this would not be capped: “Now it’s time to get ready for the final act: getting your data out of the spreadsheet program and into whatever format is best for your masterpiece.”
- Serial commas: comma before final “and X” (e.g. “Phones and tablets from Samsung, Motorola, Nexus, and many others.”)
- Bullets: Use periods at the ends of all bullets if the list is dominated by longer sentences
- Try to avoid using apostrophes in contractions; convert “won’t” “don’t” “we’ll” “it’s” etc. to full version (i.e. “will not”) when possible, but not if it looks awkward.
- Avoid using hyphenated prefixes, e.g. “multi-page” becomes “multipage”, “sub-section” becomes “subsection”. But other hyphenated words are not changed, e.g. “built-in”
Italics and capitalization
- Cap names of buttons, icons, or named software features (Home, AutoFill, Profile, Register Now) but not descriptive names — pencil icon, red button, etc.
- Italicize names of chapters or subsections referenced in the body text (this benefits print readers). Do not use quotation marks around titles, chapter names, or subtitles.
- Do not cap or ital generic nouns or verbs (header photo, toolbar, search) unless it’s a new term mentioned for the first time (tweet, home timeline)
- Italicize and lowercase URLs for print
- For headings, titles, and subtitles, use sentence case (only first word capped)
Terminology
- Acronyms: Widely known acronyms (FBI) don’t need to be defined. Otherwise, place the acronym after the full term on the first mention, e.g. Impairment Related Work Expense (IRWE), and use the acronym thereafter.
- Exception: an important term that is hard to remember but appears repeatedly throughout the book, it is OK to spell out the phrase again even if the acronym has already been defined.
Try to move away from “clicking” as many people use software on a tablet. “press” or “select” are substitutes. - Spelling/caps: Wi-Fi, Web, Internet, website. megabits per second (Mbps).
- Use “log in” instead of “log on”, “logon” or “sign in” unless it’s referencing the spelling that another service uses (for instance, Google uses sign-in with a hyphen).
- Use “drop-down” instead of “dropdown”
Index Guidelines
- Use Word’s “Mark index entry” feature to mark words or phrases for the index. Learn the keyboard shortcuts (Windows: Alt + Shift + X; Mac: Command + Option + Shift + X ) which will make things go faster. Creating an entry will add code to the document that cannot be seen unless you toggle the paragraph icon on Word’s Home tab).
- Writers/editors mark index entries, but the interior designer will actually compile it and place it at the end of the book at a later production stage.
- Go through and do longer terms first before tackling shorter terms included in the longer term (e.g., “profile optimization” before “profile”) or it will be harder to index the longer terms later.
- Use plural version of word over singular, except when singular is normal (for instance, “brain” instead of “brains” when talking about the human body).
- Use lowercase except for proper names
- Use subentries when it’s clearly logical to do so.