Style Guides and ChatGPT

Sep 17

As a freelance editor, I often receive a style guide to work from when editing a manuscript. But not always—and sometimes the style guides I receive aren’t very robust. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a comprehensive one to begin with before editing? Can ChatGPT help?

I decided to test this out by asking ChatGPT to create a style guide for my blog posts. To date, I have six blog posts up. Am I consistent? Probably not, because I don’t have a style guide!

First Steps

First, I ask ChatGPT to help me:

Screenshot of a ChatGPT conversation. The user requests help in creating a style guide for their blog and wants it in a Word document. The user lists specific categories for the style guide, including proper nouns, hyphenated words, and acronyms. — *First Prompt to ChatGPT*

I attach all Word files for my blog posts.

This is what ChatGPT returns to me:

Screenshot of the initial style guide for Marcella Weiner's blog. The guide is divided into sections: Proper Nouns, Hyphenated Words, Acronyms, Formatting Rules, Common Terminology, and Consistency and Preferred Usage. — *ChatGPT’s First Attempt at My Style Guide*

This is great! But I decide I don’t need all the other categories and prefer simplicity: just a single alphabetical list of all the proper nouns, hyphenated words, and acronyms.

Refining the Style

I go back to ChatGPT and continue my conversation, asking it to modify my style guide:

Screenshot of a ChatGPT conversation. The user requests to combine Proper Nouns, Hyphenated Words, and Acronyms into an alphabetized list with the heading "Style Guide for Marcella's Blog Post." ChatGPT creates the document and provides a link. — *Second Prompt to ChatGPT*

Round 2, and this is what ChatGPT provides me:

Screenshot of the combined and alphabetized style guide for Marcella's blog post. This list includes all proper nouns, acronyms, and hyphenated words. — *ChatGPT’s Second Attempt at My Style Guide*

Better, but all the lowercase words are at the bottom of the list. Back to conversing with ChatGPT:

Screenshot of a ChatGPT conversation. The user requests further adjustments to the style guide by alphabetizing the entire list and removing duplicates. The document is created, and the user is provided with a download link. — *Third Prompt to ChatGPT*

The Final Product

And the final guide is here:

Screenshot of the final style guide for Marcella's blog post. It includes alphabetized proper nouns, acronyms, and hyphenated words. — *ChatGPT’s Final Product*

This is something I can work with! I could have also specified how I wanted ChatGPT to alphabetize my list (word by word or letter by letter) and asked ChatGPT to alphabetize names by last name. Lesson learned: If you don’t get what you want, ask again.

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Marcella Fecteau Weiner

Marcella Fecteau Weiner is a freelance editor who edits nonfiction books, teacher resources, and assessment tools.

https://marcellaweiner.com

Style Guides and ChatGPT

First Steps

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Using editGPT with Word