What’s in a style guide and why you need one
Judy Knighton | May 30, 2018
Do you need a style guide for the words your organisation writes? We say ‘yes’.
Style is a way of presenting yourself to the world. You express your organisation’s personality as much through your words as through visual elements like branding. So consistent style in both is important.
What’s the difference between rules, fashion, and style?
Like clothing and graphic design, writing has rules, fashions, and styles.
In clothing:
- rules dictate what can be worn where (such as having to cover certain areas of your body in public, or being forbidden from wearing coverings on your face and head in a bank)
- fashion dictates the kind of garments you can buy this season
- style is about the choices you make — choices that let you express your personality.
Style lets you express your personality. Image by Godisable Jacob / CC0
Graphic designers follow rules that experience and research tell them work: rules about balance and colour and shape. We see fashion in design, too, as designers adopt certain colours, fonts, and ways of blocking out the page. Designers also create visual style guides for clients: a set of design decisions that expresses the organisation’s personality and establishes its brand.
The same applies to words. In writing:
- rules govern grammar, punctuation, and spelling
- fashion tends to offer us clichés (which we avoid like the plague) and jargon (let’s socialise that idea to facilitate a paradigm shift)
- style covers all the small choices where English offers more than one correct way to do things — you (or your organisation) gets to choose which style best reflects your brand.
What message are you sending to readers?
Let’s take a simple example. In a document with headings, will you make them title case or sentence case? That is, will you give an initial capital to every meaningful word in the heading, like this?
How to Capitalise a Title-Case Heading, Described by Judy
Or will you use initial capitals only for the first word and for any proper nouns, like this?
How to capitalise a sentence-case heading, described by Judy
Title case feels a little old-fashioned and formal. It isn’t wrong, and if that style is what works for your market, go for it.
Sentence case is marginally easier for people to read, since their eye doesn’t keep getting hooked on all those extra capitals. It also has a more modern feel.
A third possibility is that you haven’t decided which style you want, so you end up with a mixture. If you have no style guide or style sheet, and every member of your team writes headings to their own preference, you have a high chance of being in this third group on at least some of your style decisions.
What might be in your style guide?
A simple style sheet might record the specific decisions you make on a single document project, or on a connected set of documents. An organisation-wide style guide might include some general rules, as well as straight style decisions. Here are the first thirteen items on the table of contents of The Write Style Guide:
- Abbreviations
- Apostrophes
- Appendices and glossaries
- Brackets
- Capitals
- Colons and semicolons
- Commas
- Copyright and Creative Commons
- Dashes and hyphens
- Ellipses
- Endnotes and footnotes
- Fonts
- Greetings and farewells
By using a style guide to make sure your documents are correct and consistent, you’ll save time researching rules and making on-the-fly style decisions. You’ll also present your organisation as it wishes to be seen, and you’ll avoid confusing your readers.