How to Create a Writing Style Guide Using AI

Ever wondered how brands manage to create seamless consistency between their social media, website, and marketing material?

Style guides play a major role in the crafting of a solid brand identity and are often the rulebook that sets standards for consistency. Simply put, style guides outline how a brand, organization, or blog communicates with their audience.

Let's take a look at how to craft your own style guide and speed up the process with help from Wordtune.

1. Establish a consistent tone of voice

Consider these questions to start defining your tone of voice:

• How formal is your brand?
• How do you tell your story?
• Are you trying to persuade your readers (e.g. to buy your services) or is your content designed to be neutral or educational?
• Are you excited and upbeat or calm and intentional?

Once you’ve answered these questions, you should have a good idea of the kind of tone you want to convey. Wordtune can help maintain consistency in tone of voice with its new?Brand Tone feature. Using this feature, you can set up customized rules and automatically update your copy according to your brand guidelines.?

2. Identify your different audience personas

Audience personas refer to the different types of people that encounter your content and blog posts. For example, if you sell school supplies, your audience will include teachers and parents. Your audience could also include school administrators who procure larger wholesale orders.?

Keep in mind that each persona you identify will have slightly different needs, questions, or information that they’re looking for. It’s important to consider how to speak to each of these in a way that is appropriate and inclusive.

3. Ensure inclusive language is used

Inclusive language, also known as equity language, is a benchmark standard for today’s content. It is important to avoid words or phrases that are biased, unnecessary jargon, or discriminatory language against specific groups of people.

Providing a guideline for inclusive language in your style guide supports writers, editors, and anyone else within your organization to craft content aligned with your values.?

For example, it’s considered good practice to avoid gendered terms in favor of neutral alternatives, like “flight attendant” instead of “stewardess” and “fire fighter” instead of “fireman.”

4. Include branded words and phrases

Establish how you talk about your brand or organization from the outset by defining certain branded words and phrases. Branded words and phrases provide a consistent way to refer to your organization, product, or services, and should be included in your style guide. Examples of branded words and phrases include company name, product names, and service names.?

5. Set grammar rules

Set recommendations for grammar usage that cover elements like capitalization, punctuation, spelling, and verb tenses. Wordtune can help to ensure that your voice is consistent and provide rewrite suggestions to simplify your language, too. It can also help to manage grammar inconsistencies by picking up any errors or suggesting alternatives. You’ll find “Editor’s Suggestions” in the panel to easily review and approve or reject suggestions.

6. Decide on common practices?

Specify how to handle common practices like formatting, quotation marks, specific phrasing, and more. For instance, your style guide could specify that a company name should always be written with the first letter of each word capitalized (e.g., AI21 Labs) and product names with all words capitalized (e.g., Wordtune). Or, the guide could state that you should always use active voice in your writing.

7. Define preferred styles for each piece of content

Running an Instagram account, writing for your company blog, and crafting bespoke LinkedIn content all require a different approach. By defining preferred styles for different platforms and content channels, you can maintain consistency. For example, content for Instagram is usually friendly, informal, and playful. It’s a great place to showcase yourself to potential customers. On the other hand, LinkedIn content is aimed at business professionals, meaning it will be more formal and authoritative. Usually, you’re speaking to your peers in the industry and it’s a good idea to adjust your writing accordingly.?

8. Provide examples of how visuals complement written content

Visuals add flair and interest to your content. Many readers’ attention spans wane when faced with a wall of text. By adding in images, illustrations, infographics, etc., you can break up the text, illustrate your point, and keep your audience interested for longer.?

However, without rules for how to handle visuals as part of your content, you could end up with awkward stock photos, inconsistent quality, and missing captions. Creating guidelines for how to handle visuals can elevate your blog experience. A style guide for visual assets should include elements like guidelines for image formats, sizes, resolutions, and how to source images, as well as recommendations for colors, fonts, logos, and other visual elements.

9. Craft a "Do Not Mention" list

Want to avoid mentioning a competitor’s name? Are there certain topics that are best avoided, such as politics? By crafting a “Do Not Mention” list you’ll establish immediately what is and isn’t acceptable to talk about. Getting your whole team on board and aware of any hard rules can minimize complications down the line.?

Establishing a list of topics, words, or competitors to avoid can help to ensure that everyone is on the same page and has an understanding of the expectations and boundaries of discussion.?

10. Include examples in your style guide

Examples illustrate your points and clarify what you’re asking of your team and how to do it in practice. For instance, if part of your content production includes email campaigns, you could include a section on how to write emails that are clear and concise. To illustrate this in practice, include a sample email so that everyone can see how it should be done.

Consider using Wordtune’s suggestion feature to help you illustrate different aspects of writing — from rewriting sentences for clarity to providing jokes to create a more casual tone.?

Conclusion

It’s vital to establish a consistent tone of voice and identity for your blog, business, or website with a comprehensive style guide. Wordtune can help the process of crafting and maintaining a consistent style by picking up simple mistakes, switching seamlessly between tones, making writing suggestions, and much more. By following the steps outlined above, you’ll be able to establish a solid foundation for your new style guide.