Why a Personal Style Guide Makes Sense

If you dictate regularly — whether you are a barrister, a property surveyor, a GP writing referral letters, or a novelist working on a trilogy — you will have noticed that no two typists transcribe quite the same way. One will write "9am", another "9.00 a.m.", and a third "nine o'clock in the morning". Individually these choices are trivial. Across a hundred pages of dictation, they become a distraction that pulls the reader away from what you actually said.

A personal style guide is simply a short document, usually one or two pages, that records how you want your work to look. It sits alongside the audio file when you send a dictation job to your transcription support, and it saves everyone time. Your typist stops guessing, you stop correcting the same small things, and repeated projects begin to feel like they were produced by one coherent voice rather than a series of disconnected sessions.

Punctuation: The Decisions Worth Recording

Most punctuation follows standard British usage, so there is no need to restate the obvious. What matters is the small set of choices where reasonable people differ. These are the ones to pin down first.

• Serial commas. Do you want "contracts, leases and deeds" or "contracts, leases, and deeds"? Pick one and stick with it. Many UK professional documents omit the final comma, but a legal or technical writer may prefer it for clarity in lists of clauses.
• Dashes. Spaced en dashes (like this – with room on both sides) read more calmly in prose. Unspaced em dashes (like this—tightly closed) look more American. If you dictate in a hurry and say "dash", your typist needs to know which you meant.
• Quotation marks. British practice generally uses single quotes first, with double quotes for quotations within quotations. Confirm this if your work crosses into US publishing.
• Brackets and asides. Note whether you want round brackets for clarifications and square brackets for editorial insertions, or whether you prefer commas wherever possible.
• Sentences you leave unfinished. Dictation often produces trailing thoughts. Say whether you want these tidied into complete sentences or preserved with an ellipsis and a note.

One practical tip: record yourself reading your style guide aloud. Hearing your own voice explain a rule takes thirty seconds and gives your typist a reference point for how you speak when you are being deliberate rather than spontaneous.

Abbreviations, Numbers and Dates

This is where consistency matters most, because inconsistency is easiest to spot. A document that switches between "approx." and "approximately", or between "3rd March" and "March 3", looks careless even when the content is sound.

• Common abbreviations. Decide on "e.g." and "i.e." with full stops, or "eg" and "ie" without. Choose "etc." or "and so on". Note whether "per cent" is two words (usual in British prose) or the symbol "%" is acceptable in tables and figures.
• Titles and honorifics. Mr, Mrs, Ms, Dr, Prof — with or without full stops. Most UK house styles now drop them, but many solicitors and clinicians still prefer "Mr." and "Dr." in correspondence.
• Numbers. A reliable default is words for one to nine and figures from 10 upwards, but your subject may override this. Measurements, prices and statistics are almost always figures. Say so explicitly.
• Dates. Choose "12 June 2025" or "12th June 2025" or "September 12, 2026" and never mix them. Add the day of the week only when it is genuinely useful.
• Times. "9am", "9 am" or "09:00" — each suits a different context. Financial and medical work often favours the 24-hour clock.
• Money. Note whether you want "£1,500", "£1,500.00" or "one thousand five hundred pounds" in running text.

Preferred Spellings and House Vocabulary

Your own vocabulary deserves a section of its own. Every profession has words that cause typists to pause: technical terms, client names, product names, place names, and the particular jargon of your trade.

Start with spellings that have legitimate variants. -ise or -ize endings, judgement or judgment, focused or focussed, acknowledgement or acknowledgment, enquiry or inquiry, practice or practise as noun and verb. None of these is wrong, but switching between them mid-document is. Make the call once, write it down, and your typist will apply it without thinking.

Then list your proper nouns. The correct capitalisation of a company, the exact spelling of a client's surname, the way you write a product code or a case reference. Add anything you have ever had to correct twice. A short glossary at the end of the style guide pays for itself within a fortnight.

Formatting and Handling Uncertainties

Formatting rules are quick to state and easy to follow. Headings in bold or title case? Paragraph spacing or first-line indents? Bulleted lists ending in full stops or not? Page numbers, headers, and whether you want a document title at the top. If your work goes into a template, describe the template and attach it.

Just as important is telling your typist what to do when the audio is unclear. Agree a convention: mark an inaudible word with [inaudible] and a best guess with [word?], rather than silently inventing something plausible. Ask for a short list of flagged queries at the end of the document, or as comments in the margin. This turns an awkward moment into a quick check and protects the accuracy of the finished piece.

Keeping the Guide Alive

A style guide is not a legal document, so do not treat it like one. Start with half a page if that is all you need. Add to it whenever you find yourself typing the same correction for the third time; that repetition is the signal that a rule is missing.

Review it once or twice a year, or whenever you start a substantial new project. Share it with anyone who transcribes for you, and keep a copy where you can find it quickly. Over time it becomes less a set of instructions and more a description of how you write — which is exactly what a good typist needs in order to make your dictation sound like you at your most careful.