Style Guides and Tools

Online guides to writing style

• Associated Press Styleguide requires a paid subscription. American English but AP is a contributor to many news publishers. The 2018 edition, without legal briefing, is available on Amazon Kindle Unlimited.
• BBC News style guide at the BBC Journalism Academy
• Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) is the definitive US style guide. It is available in print and also online by subscription at https://chicagomanualofstyle.org/.
• Economist Style Book is no longer on their website but it is still available in print and they still publish the Johnson articles on language.
• Google developer documentation style guide, including a word list of words to avoid or to use with care.
• Gov.uk web site style guide from the UK Government Digital Service. The guide covers style, spelling and grammar conventions for all content published on .gov.uk.
• The Guardian newspaper style guide
• Google HTML and CSS style guide
• Hart’s Style Guide and other proofreading and copy-editing resources are discussed in the page on communications.
• New Yorker videos by the Comma Queen, Mary Norris, covering interesting and contentious matters of grammar and copy editing. Most of the videos are a couple of minutes long. The videos are available on YouTube. There is a web site with Mary Norris’s blog and details of her book.
• Telegraph newspaper style booki, includes a list of words to avoid using.
• Web Style Guide by Patrick J Lynch and Sarah Horton. Known as the Yale Style Guide. The web site includes an online version. The print version is in its third edition.

Tools to improve writing style

• Gender determination from writing style is claimed by some software tools that analyse reading difficulty. One paper that discusses this using texts from the British National Corpus is http://u.cs.biu.ac.il/~koppel/papers/male-female-text-final.pdf, Argamon, Koppel, Fine and Shimoni: Gender, Genre, and Writing Style in Formal Written Texts, 2003. This and other papers are also available from Shlomo Armaon's academia.edu page [registration required].
• Matt Might at the University of Utah has produced a set of bash scripts, intended for use with TeX. After years of reading student’ PhD theses, Matt wrote these scripts to detect three categories of stylistic problems:
  1. abuse of the passive voice,
  2. weasel words:
     1. Salt and pepper words that look like technical words, but convey nothing. For example ‘various’, “fairly’, ‘a number of’.
     2. Beholder words that tell the reader how to react, such as ‘interestingly’, ‘surprisingly’.
     3. Adverbs, which have no place in technical writing.
  3. lexical illusions.
• Plagiarism checker at SmallSEOTools.