How to Create Your Own Writer’s Style Guide

<p>I learned about style guides in the late 1990s when I was a baby newspaper reporter in the actual Armpit of America.</p> <h2><a href="https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/armpit-of-america?source=post_page-----7afb0476a551--------------------------------" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Armpit of America</a></h2> <h3><a href="https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/armpit-of-america?source=post_page-----7afb0476a551--------------------------------" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Discover Armpit of America in Battle Mountain, Nevada: Small Nevada town embraced its designation as the &quot;Armpit of&hellip;</a></h3> <p><a href="https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/armpit-of-america?source=post_page-----7afb0476a551--------------------------------" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">www.atlasobscura.com</a></p> <p>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?</p> <p>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.</p> <p>As a novelist? I mostly use my&nbsp;<em>very own</em>&nbsp;personalized style guide.</p> <h1>This was one of the coolest things about being published by Penguin.</h1> <p>I won&rsquo;t sit here and try to convince you that there weren&rsquo;t a ton of cool things about having my first novel published. There were. Obvs.</p> <p>But one of the coolest and, arguably, the one that&rsquo;s helped me the most over the last ten years, was being presented with a personalized style guide. I had no idea that this was a thing that happens.</p> <p>The copy editor who worked on my novel created a guide for me. It was full of all of the edits they had to make. The mistakes I routinely struggle with. Plus, a basic story Bible full of information about my own story.</p> <p><a href="https://medium.com/the-write-brain/how-to-create-your-own-writers-style-guide-7afb0476a551"><strong>Website</strong></a></p>