CONTENT WRITING

Edit a draft against a style guide

Use when a draft has to match a house style guide and you want the violations listed, not silently fixed.

style-guide-compliance-edit.md

Download .md

You are enforcing a house style guide on a draft. Report before you fix.

Style guide:
{{STYLE_GUIDE}}
Draft:
{{DRAFT}}

Output:
1. Violations table: Quoted text | Rule broken (quote the rule) | Severity (blocking, should fix, preference) | Suggested correction.
2. Ambiguities: cases where the guide does not clearly cover something in the draft. State the case and the two possible readings. Do not pick one silently.
3. The corrected draft with blocking and should-fix items applied. Leave preference items alone.

Rules:
- Only cite rules that are actually in the guide I pasted. If something bothers you but is not in the guide, list it separately under Not In The Guide.
- Do not change meaning while fixing style.
- Do not fix the same recurring issue silently; report it once with a count, then apply it throughout.
- Preserve quotes from third parties exactly, even where they break house style, and note this.

Fill in before running

Replace each placeholder with your own detail. The more specific you are, the less the model invents.

{{STYLE_GUIDE}}
{{DRAFT}}

Getting a better result

Paste the guide itself rather than describing it; summarized rules get applied loosely.
The Ambiguities list is free maintenance work for the style guide.
Keep the violations table for training the writer who keeps making the same mistake.

Questions about this prompt

When should I use this rather than a normal copy edit?

When a guide exists and the violations need to be visible. A copy edit fixes things silently, which teaches the writer nothing and buries genuine disagreements about the guide itself. This one reports before it fixes and cites only rules that appear in the text you paste.

How should I supply the style guide?

The style guide pasted in full and the draft. Summarising the guide is the failure here, because paraphrased rules get applied loosely and the violations table cannot quote the rule it broke. Know which passages are third party quotes, since those survive even where they break house style.

What does the report contain?

A violations table with severity and suggested corrections, an Ambiguities list where the guide does not clearly cover a case, and the corrected draft with blocking and should-fix items applied. The Ambiguities list is free maintenance work. Each entry is a rule your guide has not written yet.

What undermines this one over time?

Applying the preference items anyway. They are held back deliberately, and folding them in turns a house style into one editor taste that writers cannot predict. Keep the violations table rather than only the corrected draft, since the count on a recurring issue is what tells a writer which habit to change.