A style guide is a document that lays out basic rules for written communication. The point of a style guide is to make sure writing is clear even when it’s done by different people across an office or industry.
There are many formal style guides for different disciplines. “The Chicago Manual of Style,” for example, is a common reference for book authors and historians, while the Modern Language Association’s (MLA) style guide is usually used for academic papers in the humanities or liberal arts. As for journalists, many use guidance from the Associated Press, commonly called AP style.
The Associated Press is a nonprofit cooperative of journalists based all over the world. According to the AP, the cooperative first formed in 1846 during the Mexican War when five newspapers pooled their resources to cover the conflict from afar. Today, the AP is a wire service with journalists based in more than 100 countries. These journalists cover everything from politics to culture to sports. Outlets around the globe subscribe to the AP and run its original digital stories, radio and television reports, graphics, photography and more.
The AP writing guides date back to at least 1900, according to a brief history compiled Merrill Perlman at the Columbia Journalism Review. The early guides focused on how to send stories by radio and telegraph, and the first stylebook published in 1953. As Perlman notes, the foreword of that stylebook addressed the difficulty in defining rules for writing: “The English language is fluid and changes incessantly. What last year may have been very formal, next year may be loosely informal.”
Because language is so fluid, the AP publishes a new stylebook once a year — usually in late May. The book always addresses basic grammar and usage, but it also provides new guidance on specific words or phrases and the reasoning behind these changes. The guide also gives general advice on journalistic practice, media law and social media.
Many news outlets use AP style, and job postings often ask applicants to be familiar with it. But publications may also develop internal style guides. As a staffer or freelancer, you should be familiar with your employer’s preferences. For example, SELF published a new style guide in 2018 to match its evolving philosophy on writing about health, weight and bodies. The New Yorker has a reputation for unusual — and stuffy — rules, insisting on double constants in words such as traveller and a diaeresis in words with double vowels such as naïve and coöperate. And while BuzzFeed’s guide covers the basics, it also sets rules for words or punctuation that might not appear in the average newspaper. Always ?! and never !?, for example, and both baby daddy and baby mama should be two words, not one.