Do you have a style guide?

If you want your written material to make a strong impact on customers and inspire confidence in your brand, it needs to be consistent, to strike the right tone, and to reflect what you’re all about. A style guide can help you with this.

Why would you need a style guide?

The chances are that your organisation produces written content of some sort, such as: 

• Web content, blog posts
• Magazines, newsletters, press releases, leaflets, brochures
• Business reports and reviews
• Fact sheets, guidelines, policy documents.

A style guide can help you to project a strong, coherent identity, with a consistent ‘look and feel’ to all this material, so that it will get your message across smoothly. It can help to shape the tone, pace and flow of the writing, so that it will resonate with your target readers.

If a number of people are involved in the writing and editing, or it’s done over a long period, inconsistencies are especially likely to creep in. A documented house style, with someone to enforce it, can help to iron them out.

What is a style guide?

It’s a set of guidelines, with details of an organisation’s preferences about various aspects of writing.

Many elements of spelling, grammar and punctuation aren’t governed by cast-iron ‘rules’. Instead, they have various conventions – or style choices – and you can decide which choices suit you best.

Here are some points that a typical style guide might deal with:

• Spelling: UK vs US, ‘-ise’ vs ‘-ize’ endings, ‘focused’ vs ‘focussed’, …
• When to use capitals, hyphens and italics
• Single or double quotes?
• Numbers: in figures or words? For example: one to ten in words, 11 and above in figures, ‘2 million’, …
• Dates: ‘1 November 2018’, ‘November 1st, 2018’, ‘01/11/2018’, ...
• Measurements
• Grammatical conventions – for example: active vs passive verb use, treating companies as singular or plural, singular ‘they’
• Words and expressions that you prefer to use or to avoid
• Contractions: for example, ‘is not’ vs ‘isn’t’
• Lists: bullets vs numbers; use of capitals and punctuation
• Titles of jobs, departments, products, services and even your organisation itself
• Industry-specific terminology
• Sentence and paragraph lengths

Publishers of books, magazines and newspapers typically have style guides, as do many other businesses and organisations.

When would you use it?

Ideally, the people who write the content in the first place should follow your style guide closely. In reality, though, they can easily get caught up in what they’re writing, and not pay full attention to how they’re writing it.

So, once the writing has been done, it’s time for an editor or proofreader to check it. This is where your house style should be applied faithfully so that you’ll make the most of it.

How can you get one?

You could write it yourself, but guidance and input from a professional editor or writer would be a big help. With the expertise they’ve gained from years of working on written content all day, they can help you to keep your style guide in line with common conventions and good practice. They can also help you to tailor it to suit the purpose of your written material, and to its audience.

Alternatively, you could hire an editor or writer to create a draft version for you, which you could then review and change as you see fit. They could look through some of your existing content, identify your preferences, pick out areas of inconsistency and potential improvement – and consolidate their findings into a clear, well-organised set of guidelines to help ensure a smooth, consistent style in the future.

Keeping it flexible

Your style guide could have separate sections for different styles you need to follow, for various types of content that you produce.

For example, you’ll probably need to use quite a different style for business reports than for promotional leaflets. Also, writing for the web and writing for printed material have differing needs. And if you’re running an international operation, different forms of English, and perhaps different styles of writing, might best suit your various markets.

Keeping it current

A style guide usually shouldn’t be set in stone. As you produce more written material, you’re likely to find more elements – words, expressions, titles and so on – that you want to standardise.

You also might start producing new types of content, or getting into new markets. It’s important to make sure all your latest needs are catered for in your style guide, and that everyone involved in the writing and editing is kept up to date.

Want to know more?

The Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP) has published a useful booklet, Your House Style: Styling your words for maximum impact, about the value of a style guide and how to create one. You can get it in printed or PDF form from the SfEP’s website here.