Balancing structural editing with a strict style guide for my dissertation, is there a systematic approach?

The most reliable way to manage this tension is to decouple your process into two distinct phases: structural macro-editing and stylistic micro-polishing. Trying to fix the flow of your arguments while simultaneously policing citation formats or hyphenation rules is a recipe for cognitive overload, which is why your current checklist approach feels like it’s failing. Instead, you should treat your dissertation as a living draft that only gets formatted once the structural integrity of a chapter is locked. By prioritizing the "skeleton" of your work first—the logical transitions, the strength of your evidence, and the clarity of your thesis—you avoid the trap of wasting hours perfecting a paragraph that you might end up cutting or moving entirely during a structural overhaul. Once you’re confident that the architecture of a chapter is sound, you can then perform a dedicated pass for the style guide, treating it as a final layer of paint rather than part of the construction process. A common misconception is that you need to maintain perfect compliance throughout the drafting phase, but this often leads to "formatting fatigue," where you become so focused on the rules that you lose sight of the narrative arc. If you’re constantly shifting paragraphs around, your internal consistency will naturally suffer because you’re essentially trying to hit a moving target. For instance, imagine you’re writing a chapter on historical methodology; if you spend your morning obsessing over the precise indentation of block quotes while you’re still deciding whether to move your primary analysis to the second section, you’re essentially doing the same work twice. If you move that analysis later, you’ll have to re-verify the formatting of those quotes all over again. By keeping your draft in a "neutral" format—clean but unformatted—until the structure is finalized, you save yourself the frustration of having to re-apply style rules to text that might not even make it into the final version. The trade-off here is that you have to be comfortable working with a "messy" document for a while, which can feel counterintuitive when your advisor is breathing down your neck about compliance. However, this method actually minimizes errors because it allows you to use automated tools or global find-and-replace functions more effectively at the very end. When you know the structure is set in stone, you can run a single, comprehensive sweep for stylistic consistency across the entire document, which is far more efficient than checking section by section. If you’re worried about losing track of specific requirements, keep a single master reference sheet next to your keyboard, but don't force yourself to apply those rules until the final polish phase. Trust that your advisor cares more about the logic of your defense than the perfect placement of a comma, and focus your energy on ensuring your arguments are bulletproof before you worry about the aesthetic finish.