This month’s blog post was contributed by Sera-Ann Hargrove, a student at the University of Iowa.

This summer, I was tasked with the opportunity to create a style guide for the University of Iowa’s OpenHawks Getting Started with Open Educational Resources guide. Part of that task was finding examples and resources to learn from. For this post, I thought I would share some of the style guide examples I found helpful, along with some general editing resources that might be useful reference when it comes to editing OER.  

The first resource I would like to highlight is the University of Arkansas OER Style Guide. This guide covers how to edit in Pressbooks, including special content formatting and plugins. With the majority of our open educational resources at the UI Libraries being in Pressbooks, this style guide from the University of Arkansas does a great job at providing insight on how to edit with the Pressbooks platform.  

BCcampus’s Self-Publishing Guide contains some great chapters on style mechanics, citing sources, and copyediting. I particularly found the style guide in the appendix helpful when it came to applying punctuation principles to the guide I was working on.  

Finally, the chapter “Writing Your Own Text” from the University of Southern Queensland’s Open Publishing Guide for Authors uses H5P activities and textboxes in Pressbooks to create a clickable drop-down style guide. 

For some more general editing resources, I recommend checking out the following: 

• For understanding the various style guides of academic disciplines: 
  • Purdue OWL is a great resource for referencing the format of MLA citations 

• For figuring out specific grammar and spelling inquiries: 
  • Merriam-Webster Grammar & Usage came in handy when I was creating a spelling list of commonly misspelled words. A great tool for looking up the correct spellings and usage of terms.