There are many writer style guides and there are very popular standardized style guides, easily a dozen. Which one to use is often an important question for writers, college students, high school students and those that work at corporations and media outlets. The answer differs depending on the audience and the type of document. The truth be told, there is no “one size fits all” style guide. Those that evaluate college entrance or state teacher certificate essays, have different style guides they use and different essay scoring guidelines.
This is only the tip of the iceberg. Different colleges have different style guides they use to evaluate a college admissions essay. Going further down the road to your career, those that write for corporations, newspapers or magazines will find out that there is more than one style guide that is used. Corporations and medial outlets require that everyone and every job function write in a specific and often very rigid writing style. The problem is further complicated with the advent of ever changing search engine optimization (SEO) algorithms,. Specifically, your writing style has to be optimized for a non-human audience, a computer search engine. Thankfully, many search engines rank a document based on its literary merits, however small that might be in relation to the web page’s visitor ranking. A SEO algorithm, however may be more up to date in regards to specific linguistic or idiomatic trends than the style guide keywords your style guide recommends All which is another SEO style guide rule, stay up with demographic linguistic trends.
