For the past few weeks, I’ve been developing the style guide for the newspaper I work at. Rather than base it on the old guide, I’ve decided to start largely from scratch. The main factor leading to this was the format of guide.

Instead of being an easy-to-use guide to our preferred style, the old guide read like an addendum to the Canadian Press (CP) style book, from which we inherit many of our rules.

The problem with this implementation is that it hinges upon the user already being familiar with CP style. I can’t possibly pretend that our writers are whiling away their free time leafing through the CP book.

My guide will be — I hope — a standalone introduction not just to my paper’s in-house style, but to style guides in general. Our writers should be able to find within just about anything they need to know.