Needing a style guide
The document is organic—i.e., you add to it each time you identify an element in your document—a word, a source, a process, a design element, a format standard—that you will use later in the document and that you need to present consistently. For example, if you are writing about information design, do you write- Web site,
- Website,
- website, or
- web site?
Choosing a standard
Frequently, you think you will be consistent, but in different settings with different sources, you may change your style or begin to question what standard you were following. And you do not want to constantly go through the text to find certain standards so you can be consistent. A style guide helps you maintain that consistency by providing you with an offline document that you can reference for your established standards. The style guide becomes even more important if you are collaborating and need to provide the standards to other writers.College students already know MLA
My students question me when I assign a style guide, but most of them have only been exposed to MLA style (through high school classes or freshman rhetoric), so they do not understand the need for a style guide or the uses of a style guide.Once they begin to create their own documents—and I assign a 12-post blog for my information design class—they realize that being consistent is not always as easy as it sounds. Therefore, they create a style guide that enables me to know their personal style standards so I can reference their guides when I grade. I particularly need this to know how they are citing sources in their blogs, because I allow them to create their own citation styles.
Students need to learn other styles
Some of them choose to use APA or Wikipedia's style, but some create their own styles, and the style guide informs me of what standard the student has established.In class, we use APA for citations, and we consider other documents (specifically Web sites and blogs) to analyze the designers' consistency. By using APA, the students learn to visit an already established style guide and apply the standards, paying attention to details and formatting per the prescribed guide.
In my engineering class, students use IEEE because the style is relevant to what they will use in the workplace and when they publish their findings. IEEE's style guide has numerous versions and contains inconsistencies, so students are instructed to choose a standard and use it throughout their documents. They are also taught how to work through the citation process as they write a collaborative research paper so they can accurately cite sources that another writer has referenced.
I use a style guide as the editorial assistant for Technical Communication Quarterly. We publish the style guide online so authors can reference the guide, but my job is to know the style guide and apply it to all articles before we publish. I have also used style guides when I have edited larger works, like medical textbooks.
