There is no shortage of great resources online for creating a style guide. Most of these focus on the why and the broader brand implications for voice, tone, and style. These are great, and if you don’t understand why a style guide is important, I highly recommend you check some of these out (links at the bottom).
But what I want to address here is the nitty gritty of actually creating
and distributing a style guide that sticks.
By that I mean it’s easy to use, navigate, update, and enforce.
So how do you build your own? Here are 6 practical tips for making your content style guide effective.
1. Brace yourself and get buy-in early.
I’ve rolled out style guides at half a dozen law firms, and I have to tell you, they are weirdly political projects.
Everybody has their grammar quirks, mistaken understandings, and attachments to outdated rules. And at law firms, that can become contentious remarkably fast.
If you want to be successful in not just creating but enforcing your style guide, get buy in and support early for the inevitable conflict and pushback you’ll get.
Start with an informal list of issues you see frequently, recommend an approach, and make sure leadership will have your back in committing to it.
That means editing for conformity. It means pushing back on attorneys and other folks whose text you’ll be changing. Make sure your boss is ready for pushback and complaints, because I guarantee you’ll get them.
2 . Start with an established style guide.
One space after periods or two?
Serial comma or no?
Title case or sentence case?
You’ll have to make a hundred decisions about how your firm is going to handle specific grammar rules. Both the process of making those decisions, and the process of defending and enforcing those decisions, will be so much easier if you start with an established, known, and accepted set of rules.
Chicago. AP. Bluebook.
Pick an established style guide. Make it your north star.
(Please don’t go with Bluebook. You’re writing marketing copy, not legal briefs.)
If you go with Chicago, be prepared for your PR team to argue that they should use AP style so as to align with the way journalists write.
If you go with AP, be prepared for disputes over state abbreviations.
Each guide has its strengths and weaknesses. You probably have a sense of which guide is the most natural fit for your team and your firm.
I recommend leaning into existing preferences and habits rather than trying to bend the whole firm to your will.
3 . Anticipate the questions/make specific/address the quirks.
If you’re already producing content for your firm, you probably have a good sense of which grammar rules trip people up, which ones you’ll have disputes over, and which ones are particularly sensitive for your team.
Lean into all of this. Anticipate the questions you’ll receive, and make sure they are easy to answer with the style guide. Make sure the style guide provides examples that specifically address the questions and situations you’ve faced.
I’ve also found success in creating a 1-page at-a-glance distilled version of the style guide that highlights these frequently asked questions to make it that much easier for folks to check on the rules they care about most.
4 . Make it easy to use.
You want your style guide to be useful to your team, and for that to happen, it has to be easy for them to find the information they need. The way I handle this is to lean into formatting and design, use white space strategically, and whenever possible include examples and bulleted information rather than paragraphs of text.
I organize my style guides like a dictionary, A to Z by the word, phrase, or grammar issue a user may be looking for.
For example, if you want to include guidance on serial commas, you’ll include that under S. But you may also want to include it under O for “Oxford comma,” since many people think of the rule that way. I try to include entries as many times as needed for ease of searching. So for affect/effect – I include the entry under both the As and the Es.
This does create a fair bit of repetition, and you’ll need to keep that in mind when you’re updating the document, but the benefit to the user far outweighs the added effort in updating the document.
5 . Distribute hard copies.
When you’re ready to roll out your style guide, provide hard copies to your team. It sounds counterintuitive in the year 2022, but I find that hard copies are more relied upon, easier to thumb through, and remain top of mind more than electronic docs.
You can still send out the Google doc version or Word version for easy searching, but the hard copy sends a signal about how seriously your department (and the firm) takes consistency and clarity in your team’s written work.
If you do provide hard copies, I strongly recommend using a three-ring binder. That way, if you make updates or add rules later on, you only need to swap out the affected pages rather than providing all-new copies. Also, ask your graphic designer (nicely) to make a nice cover for your style guide.
6 . Pair it with a proofing process.
Your style guide is only as good as your ability to enforce consistency across your team’s written materials. The best way I’ve found to do this is to pair your new style guide with a process for proofing materials produced by the marketing team.
Politically, this is a great way to win support for your guide (and especially for the controversial style rules you’ve just codified. Billing this as a way to reduce typos and mistakes and ensure accuracy, consistency, and error-free work product is a great way to win broad support and buy in.
As you consider your proofing process, ask yourself (and your team) two questions: what items are subject to proofing? and who has final say on corrections?
Hopefully you have someone on your team in a communications leadership role and maybe a person or two who lead writing projects (or are particularly good proofers). Give those people authority to make final determinations on any grammar questions, but make sure proofing responsibilities don’t fall just to them.
Spread it out. Get everyone involved.
It’s a way to ensure your whole team is invested in creating a consistent work product, and it’s a way to train the whole department to be better proofers and writers.
Other resources:
- Content style guide: A step-by-step guide to creating your own (GatherContent)
- Welcome to the Mailchimp Content Style Guide (Mailchimp)
- How to Create a Writing Style Guide [+Free Guide & Examples] (HubSpot)
