AP Style Guide for Your Blog

June 26th, 2025

The style guide you use for your content is a critical part of your brand. Using AP style for blog posts is a popular choice that creates a consistent experience for your readers, making your blog more cohesive and readable.

While there are many style guides to choose from, AP style stands out as one of the most prominent and well-established options for today’s writers. By learning the basics of AP style for a blog, you can elevate your content and set a higher editorial standard for all future work.

What is AP Style?

AP style, or Associated Press style, is a set of writing standards designed primarily for journalism and reporting. It provides a comprehensive list of rules for editorial elements, including grammar, punctuation, spelling, capitalization, and abbreviations.

The Associated Press news agency published the AP Stylebook in 1953 to standardize its publications, and it has continued to evolve and expand in the decades since. Although originally developed for news writing, AP style has been widely adopted by a variety of publications. You can find AP style in newspapers, magazines, websites, and, of course, blogs.

Why Use AP Style?

Even if your company’s blog doesn’t focus on journalistic content, you can still benefit from using AP style. Because it’s so widespread, many readers are already familiar with AP format. This can make them more comfortable with reading your brand’s content.

AP style also adds a sheen of professionalism and expertise to your work. The AP stylebook has in-depth guidance for all kinds of writing conventions, so following AP style is a great way to standardize your writing and improve your brand consistency.

Additionally, it’s fairly simple to pick up on AP. Although the AP style guide is extensive, there are also many online resources available to help you learn the basics.

Other Style Guides to Know

While AP is the gold standard, there are other style guides available for different types of writers. Here are a few options:

MLA style: The Modern Language Association style is common in the humanities and academic settings.
APA style: The American Psychological Association style is another academic style guide that focuses on research and science.
Chicago style: The Chicago Manual of Style primarily focuses on formatting details, such as capitalization and punctuation, making it a popular choice for business writing and technical writing.

Quick AP Guidelines & Resources

If you’re thinking about implementing new content standards, start by learning how to write AP style for a blog. You need to learn the AP’s standards for phrasing, punctuation, and clarity. This style focuses on consistency, accuracy, clarity, and concise phrasing.

While the AP stylebook is an extensive document with lots of information for different situations, here are some of the key tenets to know:

Headlines

AP style uses title case for headings and title capitalization. That means you should capitalize all words, except for articles and prepositions like “to”, “the”, and “and.” Other examples of words not to capitalize include:

but
for
from
at
by

These rules apply to both main titles and any subheadings throughout your work. If you’re unsure, you can always use an AP style title capitalization tool to double-check your work.

Punctuation

The general rules for punctuation include using a single space after any periods, question marks, or exclamation points. If you have a series in your title, don’t use the Oxford comma unless necessary for clarity.

Brand Names

When mentioning brand names in your content, start by referencing the brand’s full, official name. For example, use “Intel Corp” instead of just “Intel” for the first usage. You can use the shorter version for subsequent mentions, however.

There are several other rules for representing brands. For example, don’t include extra punctuation, even if it’s in the brand’s official name, such as “Yahoo!”.

You also shouldn’t capitalize all letters of a brand’s name unless you pronounce them individually. For instance, even though Ikea commonly stylizes its own name as “IKEA”, you would use “Ikea” in AP style.

This or That: Common Style Mix-Ups

There are plenty of exceptions and quirks in AP style that you’ll pick up on over time. Here’s a quick Q&A that explores some of the less intuitive AP style conventions:

Is AP style “noon” or 12 p.m.? AP style uses “noon” and “midnight” instead of 12 p.m. and 12 a.m. All other times are formatted as the time followed by the morning or afternoon signifier, such as 6:45 p.m. or 9 a.m.
Does AP style ever use the Oxford comma? AP style doesn’t usually use the Oxford comma. However, it does allow you to use the Oxford comma if your sentence would be confusing without it.
How does AP style list degrees? With AP style, you spell out most degrees, like “bachelor’s degree” and “master’s degree.” However, it uses the abbreviation “Ph.D.” as an exception.

Formatting Your Blog

Considering all of this, how do you format an article in AP style? Ultimately, the AP guide doesn’t have clear-cut rules for formatting the paragraphs, sections, and layout of your blog.

While other style guides, such as MLA, have rules about margins and spacing, the AP leaves it up to you. Ultimately, you should focus on a blog layout and format that makes your text scannable and easy to read on desktop and mobile devices.

Does AP Style Impact SEO?

AP style doesn’t directly impact SEO. However, using a consistent style guide can enhance the quality and performance of your company’s blog, ultimately improving engagement with your target audience and its search ranking over time.

Upgrading Your Blog Formatting and Beyond

Adopting AP style is one of the easiest ways to boost the professionalism of your content and create a more consistent body of work. Once you get a handle on the basics of punctuation, capitalization, and spelling, you’ll be able to ensure that all of your blog posts have the same writing standards, helping you build your brand’s reputation.

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