The Style Manual rules that slip through review
Nobody misses the big Style Manual guidance. Teams know about plain language, sentence length and active voice. What slips through review are the small mechanical conventions. They're easy to know and hard to notice. Because they're hard to notice, they survive round after round of careful review.
Here are the usual suspects.
Double quotation marks
The Style Manual uses single quotation marks, with doubles only for a quote inside a quote. US software defaults push everyone the other way, so doubles creep in with every paste.
Words where numerals belong
The Manual uses numerals for 2 and above in most content: 'the form has 3 sections', not 'three sections'. The exception is the start of a sentence, which is better rewritten than opened with a digit.
e.g., i.e. and the travelling full stops
Modern convention: no full stops in shortened forms, so 'eg' and 'ie', and in running text, prefer the words: 'for example', 'that is'. Old habits from legal drafting keep the dotted versions alive.
Title Case Headings That Look Like This
Headings take sentence case: a capital on the first word and proper nouns, nothing else. Title case reads as older, formal web style, and it hides which words are actually names.
Dates and per cent
Australian date order is day month year: 14 September 2026, no ordinals, no commas. And with numerals, the Manual now uses the % symbol rather than 'per cent' in most content.
Why these survive review
Because reviewers read for meaning, and every one of these is meaning-neutral. Your brain corrects 'July 14, 2026' without ever reporting the error. That's not a discipline problem. It's the wrong tool. Humans should review judgement; machines should review mechanics.
That's the split we built Confetti around. It flags each of these and links to the live Style Manual page the rule comes from. Same input, same answer, every time. Judgement calls stay marked as questions, not corrections. It's free, it runs in your browser, and nothing is uploaded. Ten seconds of pasting buys a mechanical review no human can do reliably.
Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash.
Did this land?
I write these to be used, not just read. Tell me if this wouldn't work in your organisation, and why.