Editorial style is a new concept for some of our proofreading course learners. Even though the internet means style guides are more widely used these days, some students have never come across them.

So we make sure that our online proofreading course explains the basics. We use the Guardian Style Guide on our courses, and this is how we explain it. You might find the instructions helpful.

1. What is the Guardian style guide?

It is an online guide that shows you how to style the words when you are proofreading them. You can find it on this link

The idea is to use it to check that every word in the document that you are proofreading has been styled correctly. Style means achieving uniformity with things that can be expressed in several different ways. For instance, whether you would describe the time as 9am, 9AM, 9a.m., 9A.M, 9 o’clock in the morning, or 0900.

2. How to use the Guardian style guide

It is vitally important to proofread according to the house style guide, which for this course, is the Guardian Style Guide (GSG).

Until you can memorise every single item in the style guide, you will need to look up every single word and punctuation mark in the text that you are proofreading, to make sure that each one has been used according to the guide. This may sound tedious, but there is no other way of knowing for sure that you have corrected every error in the right way.

For example, you see the author has used the word: Persons.

So you look ‘persons’ up under P in the Guardian Style Guide (GSG)

So, you correct it to ‘People’, put in your query explaining why, and move on to the next thing.

See our proofreading courses