A style guide that works across semesters

The Campus History Essay Style Guide carries the editor’s decisions from one essay and semester to the next. It gives AI a defined scope for making a varied collection easier to read.

The actual guide

This example uses the Campus History Essay Style Guide, which accompanies the UNM Campus History site. The workshop snapshot is a complete text copy from September 23, 2026, matching the public repository at the time of preparation.

Its scope is concrete:

• Normalize paragraph breaks, heading levels, citation presentation, captions, and recurring page elements.
• Make light prose edits when the meaning is clear, including removing unnecessary assignment scaffolding.
• Preserve student arguments, distinctive phrasing, meaningful first person, and uncertainty supported by the evidence.
• Flag missing sources, unclear claims, and changes that would alter interpretation.

This makes consistency a matter of shared editorial decisions. It does not require identical prose from every contributor.

Try it on one essay

Attach the guide and an essay you have permission to share. Use a copy and inspect the proposed scope before editing a collection.

Use the attached Campus History Essay Style Guide to review this essay for publication in the collection. First propose changes, grouped as formatting, light prose edits, and questions for the editor. Name the guide rule behind each proposal.

Preserve the student's authorship, argument, evidence, distinctive phrasing, and justified uncertainty. Normalize presentation without making every essay sound alike. Flag missing citations and changes that would alter a claim. Ask if guide rules conflict.

After I approve the scope, edit a copy and give me a change list. Do not publish or change other essays. Check the rendered page as well as its text before calling the work finished.

Compare the original and revised text, then inspect the page as a reader sees it. A clean-looking change can still alter a claim; a text-only check can miss a broken image or misplaced caption.

A small illustration

The following sentence is invented for teaching; it is not taken from a student’s essay or an AI transcript.

Original: In conclusion, the letters suggest that students may have used the room after hours.

Proposed edit: The letters suggest that students may have used the room after hours.

The guide permits removing unnecessary concluding scaffolding. It also gives a reason to keep “suggest” and “may have” when the historical record is incomplete. Whether this sentence makes a good conclusion would still depend on its surrounding paragraph.

For a more substantial change, ask for the rule and inspect the evidence. If a citation is incomplete, flag it. If a paragraph needs a new interpretation to become coherent, return it to the editor. Save corrections to the guide so the next essay benefits from what you learned.

Check the guide too

A saved guide can accumulate inconsistencies. This snapshot refers to both header-title and image-title for an essay’s displayed title; the current student publishing guide uses header-title. It also mixes an instruction to add an opening heading with the later rule that a lead paragraph should precede section headings. An assistant should surface such conflicts for the editor to resolve before applying changes across many essays.

The workshop preserves the source guide as a snapshot. The editorial example is a chance to make its boundaries visible and test them on one page.

Return to the style-guide exercise or presentation.