House Style Guide Template
Style guide templates hand you categories to fill in. This gives each entry a compliance rate from your published copy and a query count.
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A house style guide template is a list of categories with blanks in it. Spelling, punctuation, capitalisation, numbers, tone, then a line asking you to record your deviations from whichever base guide you sit on. Filling it in produces a document, and the document is never joined to anything outside itself, so nobody ever learns which entries the publication follows, which it ignores, and which answer a question no writer has ever asked. This pack runs those two joins first and rewrites the guide from what they say.
It ships filled in for The Halstead Ledger, an invented regional daily on the AP Stylebook. Two hundred and fourteen entries, measured against 1,340 published pieces and 1,024,880 words by 34 writers. Overall compliance came out at 86.7 percent of 97,131 rule instances, which reads like a well-run desk. Per entry it is not. Forty-one entries had no occasion to apply them in 18 months and 14 were followed under 60 percent of the time. The worst ran at 37.4 percent across 2,946 instances, with 31 of the 34 bylines breaking it.
Then the second join, which is the one nothing else does. The desk answered 487 style queries over the same period, and collapsed they were 96 distinct questions, the same 96 things answered 487 times. Seven of the 12 most-asked had no entry at all. At the desk's own median of 14 minutes a round trip, the questions with no entry are 66.7 hours. Open the pack in River and the agent runs both joins, or download the blank sheets and work wherever you already do.
What's in the pack
Corpus Compliance sheet
One row per testable entry, with its own compliance rate, what you counted as an instance, and the band it falls in. Sorted worst first, because the bottom of that list is the actual guide and the top is furniture.
The byline column
The count of distinct writers who broke each entry. A rule 29 of 34 bylines break and a rule 2 break are the same compliance rate and opposite problems, and no style sheet has a column for telling them apart.
Recurring Query Log
Every style question the desk received, collapsed to distinct questions and ranked by how many times each was asked, joined to the entry that answers it or to nothing. The ranking is what decides where the rewrite starts.
The round-trip cost
Queries priced at the desk's own median answer time, split by whether an entry existed. In the worked example the unanswered questions alone are 66.7 hours, which is the argument for spending an afternoon writing 58 rulings.
Style Decision Register
One row per ruling: the question as writers phrase it, an example done right and one of the thing it rules out, the base guide's position, whether this deviates from it, the reason, and the date.
House Style Guide, stating only the departures
The rebuilt guide, carrying only the places you leave the base guide and the cases it does not cover. Every entry in it has either a compliance rate or a query count behind it, and the dead ones are gone.
Query Format and Onboarding Note
How to ask, and the one page a new writer reads instead of 223 entries, built from the most-asked questions rather than from what feels important. Both name what is out of scope so questions land in the right place.
A space rule every prompt reads first
Measure per entry and never in aggregate, treat zero instances as a finding, spread the misses across bylines before deciding anything, and record a reason on every ruling. Facts belong to the fact-check pass, not here.
How to use it
- 1
Open in River, or download it
Open the pack and let the agent run both joins, or download the blank sheets and docs and work in your own tools. The template library holds the rest.
- 2
Send the corpus and the query log
The sheet on its own can only be tidied. Send published copy with bylines attached, and any record of the questions the desk gets asked, which is the more valuable of the two and the one most desks throw away.
- 3
Measure before you edit anything
Split the sheet into what a pattern can test and what needs a human, then give every testable entry its own rate. Bands and byline spread come next. No recommendations until both are in.
- 4
Then rule from the top of the query log down
Write a ruling for the most-asked question with no entry, then the next, with a reason on every row. Stop when the tail goes quiet rather than when the categories are full.
Frequently asked questions
Is this template free?
Yes. Download the whole pack as Word documents and CSV sheets, no signup and no credit card. "Edit with AI" is a separate, optional path for anyone who wants the agent to run the two joins and draft the rulings. Nothing happens until you send it a sheet and some copy.
How is this different from a house style guide template?
A template gives you categories and you fill them from memory. This measures the sheet you already have against the copy you already published, entry by entry, and against the questions your desk was actually asked. The GOV.UK style guide conditions some of its own entries on evidence such as search term data. Most house sheets condition nothing.
What if we have no record of the style questions we get asked?
Then you run half the mechanism and the pack says so rather than presenting the corpus pass as the whole answer. Start logging from today. A desk with no query log is deciding what its guide covers by taste, and the log is cheap to keep.
Does a longer guide not defeat the point?
The worked rebuild deleted 41 dead entries, dropped 8 more, and added 58 rulings for questions that had no answer, so the guide came out nine entries longer at 223. Length was never the problem. Entries with no evidence behind them were.
Why does every ruling need a reason written down?
Because a ruling without one is a preference, and a preference gets argued with. Eighteen of the 38 questions that already had an entry were asked again anyway, 11 of them where the entry recorded no reasoning. AP publishes past answers as a searchable archive for the same reason: Ask the Editor holds thousands of them.
Should a house sheet ever deviate from its base guide?
Often, and the useful discipline is stating each departure and dating it. Base guides move: the 58th edition of the AP Stylebook carried more than 200 new and revised entries, with more added online through the year. An undated house sheet drifts against its base silently.
Where does this sit in the rest of the desk's work?
Late. Structure is settled first, by the developmental edit letter, and assertions by the fact-check pass, which grades claims against source material rather than prose against a sheet. Records work sits earlier still, in the FOIA request pack and document dump triage. Deadlines belong to the editorial calendar, where the copyedit books 1.5 hours a story.
Find out which of your rules are real
Download the blank compliance sheet, query log and decision register as Word and CSV files, or open this exact pack in River and let the agent run both joins.
Edit with AI