Style guide

What a style guide is

A style guide is the mechanical reference for everything you publish. It settles spelling, capitalisation, numbers, dates, punctuation, abbreviations, link text and the exact form of your own product names. People look things up in it. Nobody reads it through, and it is not written to be read through.

It is not brand voice guidelines, and those two get confused more than any other pair of documents I write. Voice decides whether you would ever begin an email with “Hey there”. Style decides whether that is an “email” or an “e-mail” once you have begun it. Voice is a judgement made fresh each time; style is a lookup with one right answer.

It is also not editorial guidelines, which decide what subjects you publish and what claims you are allowed to make. A style guide has no opinion on whether a piece should exist. It rules only on how the words in it are set.

When you need one

Three situations make it worth the afternoon. More than one person writes for you, and their drafts disagree with each other in small, visible ways. You sell something with a name that keeps appearing in three spellings. Or you publish in several formats at once — website, proposals, print — and the same date or figure is written differently in each.

If one person writes everything and will for the next year, a full guide mostly describes habits that are already consistent. The cheaper fix is a one-page list of words to use and avoid, which catches the handful of drifts that actually show.

What goes in it

Five sections, arranged so the entry you want is findable in seconds.

• Spelling and usage. Canadian spelling as the default, with the thirty or so words your trade argues about listed explicitly, including any you have deliberately set the American way because your customers write them that way.
• Capitals. Job titles, department names, headings, the word after a colon, and your own service names. This is the largest single source of visible inconsistency in small-business writing.
• Numbers, dates and money. When a number is spelled out, how dates are written, how prices and units are set, and where the currency label belongs.
• Your own names. The legal name, the trading name, product names with their capitals and spacing fixed, and the short forms allowed in a headline but not in a contract.
• Punctuation and page furniture. Serial commas, quotation marks, dashes, how bullet lists are punctuated, heading case, link text, captions and the format of a phone number.

What you get

The guide. Twelve to twenty pages, arranged as an A-to-Z of entries rather than as chapters, because that is how a writer with a question actually uses it. Each entry gives the ruling and one example.

The one-page card. The thirty rules that get broken most, on a single sheet. It is the page that gets pinned up, and for most writers it is the whole guide.

The decision log. A short appendix listing the calls that were genuinely arguable, with the reason each went the way it did. It exists so nobody reopens the same argument in six months.

A working hour. On video with everyone who writes for you, running a real draft through the guide together, so each person has used it once before they are asked to.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A Saskatoon company that installs and services commercial refrigeration has a 40-page site, a quarterly print newsletter and a proposal template. Four people write: the owner, an office administrator, a service manager and a freelancer who does the newsletter. The company name appears with and without “Ltd”. The maintenance plan is called Service Plus, ServicePlus and the service plus plan on three different pages. Dates are written four ways, and half the headings are in title case.

Reading the 40 pages, six proposals and four newsletters produces a list of 61 decisions. Fifty-two take a minute each because there is an obvious right answer. Nine are real arguments and go to the owner: the product name settles as Service Plus with a space, dates become the spelled-out month, and headings become sentence case everywhere, because title case had only ever been used in the newsletter. The guide runs to fourteen pages and the card to one. The freelancer stops asking, and the proposal template is corrected once instead of every time it is sent.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. Who writes for you, what keeps coming back wrong, and where your material appears. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Agreed before anything starts, based on how much material there is and how many formats it appears in.
3. Reading. Your site, your print material, your proposals and a month of outgoing email, with every inconsistency recorded. Three to five working days.
4. The decision list. The arguable calls come to you on their own, before the guide is written, so you settle them rather than discover them.
5. The guide and the card. Drafted, reviewed by you and by at least one of your writers, then delivered with the working hour. Two to three weeks from the first call.

What it costs

Quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call and agreed in writing before anything begins, because the size depends entirely on how much you have published and in how many formats. It does not move afterwards without your agreement. The pricing page sets out the four ways I work, so you can see the shape of it before we speak. A style guide written alongside voice guidelines costs less than the two bought separately, because the reading is done once.

What happens next

Most people do one of three things. They have the pages already live brought into line, which is consistency editing and is usually a single pass. They pair the guide with a voice document if they do not have one, so the mechanics and the sound are settled together. Or they build the bar the guide feeds into, as a written definition of good enough to publish. None of that is assumed. The guide is a finished reference and works on its own.