Style Guide Adherence Checker
Your text and guide
Book and journal style: serial comma, closed em dashes, numbers spelled out to one hundred.
Findings
Start typing above — the results update as you write.
Rules checked, and the preference in force
| Rule | Chicago (books) preference |
|---|---|
| Serial comma | used |
| Quotation marks | double |
| Numbers | spell out under 100 |
| Em dash spacing | closed |
| Sentence spacing | one space |
| Space before punctuation | none |
| Latin abbreviations | followed by a comma |
Scope
Only mechanical rules are checked: serial commas, quotation marks, figures below a threshold, em-dash spacing, sentence spacing, spaces before punctuation and the commas after e.g. and i.e. Each one is a fact about the text, and the preference it is judged against is listed in the table above.
A style guide cannot be reduced to rules a script can test. Headings, title capitalisation, citation format, hyphenation, abbreviations and every judgement call are out of scope. Treat a clean report as "none of these seven rules fired", not as conformance to the guide.
The Style Guide Adherence Checker applies a documented subset of mechanical rules from AP, Chicago, Oxford and Microsoft style, and shows the preference in force for each one.
What is Style Guide Adherence Checker?
A style guide is mostly editorial judgement, but a handful of its rules are purely mechanical, and those are the ones a script can check. This tool encodes seven of them, lets you choose the guide, and prints the preference each rule is being judged against so nothing has to be guessed.
Four rules change with the guide. The serial comma is the clearest: AP style omits the comma before and in a list, while Chicago, Oxford and Microsoft style require it. Quotation marks differ between British and American practice, with Oxford style preferring single marks and the others double. The numbers rule sets where figures begin, spelling out below ten in AP and Microsoft style and below one hundred in Chicago and Oxford style. Em-dash spacing is the fourth, with AP and Oxford setting dashes open with spaces and Chicago and Microsoft setting them closed.
Three rules apply to every guide. Modern style uses a single space after a full stop, so a double space is always flagged. Punctuation follows the preceding word with no space before it. And the Latin abbreviations e.g. and i.e. are followed by a comma in running text.
Each finding names the rule, shows the text that was matched, offers a suggestion and repeats the preference it was judged against. The preference table at the bottom of the page lists all seven rules and the setting for the guide you chose, which means a disagreement can be traced to a specific decision rather than a vague style score.
The scope is deliberately narrow and the page says so plainly. Headings, title capitalisation, citation formats, hyphenation, abbreviation lists, number ranges, ellipsis style and every judgement call a copy editor makes are out of scope. A clean report means none of these seven rules fired; it is not a statement that the text conforms to the guide. Treat it as the mechanical pass before a human reads for style.
The tool is most valuable for consistency. Long documents written by several people drift: one author adds the serial comma and another drops it, one uses open em dashes and another closed. Running the whole document through the checker with a single guide selected turns that drift into a list of specific fixes, and because each rule is stated, the team can decide once which setting to adopt.
Everything runs locally. The text is never uploaded, and the four presets are documented in the engine source, so the rules and their preferences can be read in full rather than inferred from behaviour.
Consistency matters more than which preset you pick. A document that applies AP style throughout reads as edited, while one that mixes AP and Chicago style conventions — a serial comma here, none there — reads as assembled from several drafts. That is why the tool applies one guide at a time and prints its preferences rather than scoring each rule in isolation. Choose the guide the publication expects, run the whole document through it, and treat the resulting list as the mechanical part of copy-editing, with the judgement calls left to a reader.
How to use Style Guide Adherence Checker
- Paste your document and choose the style guide you are working to.
- Read the findings table, which names the rule, the matched text and the suggested fix.
- Check the preference table at the bottom to confirm each rule points the way you expect.
- Fix the findings, switching guides if the document follows a different house style.
- Re-run until the report is empty, then hand the text to a human for the judgement calls.
When to use Style Guide Adherence Checker vs related tools
Use the checker when a document has to conform to a mechanical house style and you want the rules applied consistently. When the question is correctness rather than convention, the Grammar Checker covers mechanical errors independent of any guide.
If the concern is how formal the prose reads rather than how it is punctuated, the Formality Level Detector scores that, and the Redundancy Finder handles phrases that repeat themselves.
Privacy & Security
This tool runs entirely in your browser — no data ever leaves your device. There is no server round-trip, no upload, no logging, and no account required. Your input is processed locally using client-side JavaScript and is never stored, transmitted, or accessible to anyone else. When you close the tab, everything disappears.