Knowing what style guide you’re using is not just important to your writing, but to your editors, proofreaders and publishers so they know how to work with it.

Generally speaking, AP style is used for journalism, Chicago style is for publishing, and APA or MLA are for research and scholastic essays. But, like everything in life, there are exceptions and objections.

These blogs, for example, I tend to edit in AP style. To me, they’re a form of Op-Ed journalism, which I was an opinion writer when I was once a journalist a few stormy fortnights ago. This means, I don’t use Oxford commas, I write months in abbreviations and I use figures instead of suffixes.

However, the word “tend” is significant here because, well, blogs are sort of like spitball writing. You throw monkey dung at the wall and see what sticks. There’s no real style, it’s “freestyle/freeform”.

But for anything you intend to publish for an institution, establishment or in general, it’s best you don’t spitball it, but take time to research and know what style to write in. Lest the grammar police arrest you.

If you’re writing a novel, it’s best to write it in Chicago style (and NOT the pizza!). Even among these various style guides, there are variations of how it is used in formatting. For instance, I’ve seen a varied use of ellipses (written either with two spaces … one space… or no space…) in Chicago style. Text messages in Chicago are written in single quotes or sometimes in bold or brackets.

As I understand it, no matter which variant you use, so long as it is consistent throughout the novel, there’s no issue. Nothing screams sloppy or amateur like a novel that’s inconsistent with its use of grammar and syntax.

These style guides only really matter for consistency purposes. There’s a dozen or so ways to write a date, to write numbers, to write currency; these style guides become rubrics to break it down for us so we know what to use when and how to write it. If you aren’t consistent, it breaks up the writing.

So, where do you begin? Well, there’s a number of writing resources that explain these style guides and their rules. The best option is likely to buy the books themselves so that you’ll never have to dig into 16 different tabs again. But the next best options are: PurdueOwl® (single-handedly saved my college career), Grammarly, Excelsior OWL, Styleguides.io, Writing Forward, and a dozen others you can find throughout the web.

Let me tell you, your editors and proofreaders will thank you for adhering to a style guide, that way it’s less work for them and time saved for you.

Style guides are the discipline of writing. They are to your prose like the bones to a house. They will help you with clarity, uniformity and precision across documents. It is your compass and guide. The Virgil to our Dante.