What is a style guide and why is it important

Having a style guide is one of the most important aspects of any business communication strategy. A style guide helps ensure that all materials from a company have a consistent look and feel, as well as consistent messaging. It’s essential for businesses to have one in order to create an effective and efficient customer experience.

A style guide or manual of style serves as a powerful tool for ensuring consistency and accuracy in the content you produce. It contains rules for writing, formatting, and layout to ensure content is well-structured, easy to read, and aesthetically pleasing. It also helps reinforce branding by keeping your messaging consistent.

A style guide ensures that your published content is consistent, polished, recognizable, and more enjoyable. When designing a style guide, you should always put your readers or audience first. An accurate and well-written style guide helps you create a recognizable, winning voice and personality with which readers can form a more personal connection.

What is a style guide

A style guide or manual of style is a collection of rules for the writing, formatting, and layout of documents. One can use these rules for general purposes, or specific to the organization or document type. Sometimes, these rules are called Stylesheet; however, the term stylesheet has a different meaning.

A styleguide ensures consistency in a document and across multiple documents and thus improves communication and creates a brand image. It may have rules for punctuation, capitalization, numbers and date formats, table design, paragraph spacing, fonts, and many other aspects of document design. However, these rules may change from organization to organization.

The style guide may require certain best practices in usage, language and visual compositions, orthography, and typography.

For example:

• Academic and Technical Documents: A styleguide may dictate the standard and best practices for authorship, research ethics, and disclosure.
• Compliance documentation: A styleguide may cover standards for technical and regulatory information.
• Business Writing: A styleguide can explain the branding instructions.

The Style guides are concentrated in multiple ways, from the general public use to specialized audience use; such as, for learners of several educational systems, medicine, media, government, business in general, and specific industries.

Sometimes, companies create their in-house style manual that may deviate from the industry standards and style.

Why a Style Guide is Crucial for Businesses

All good brands have a great style guide. Creating a simple booklet that catalogs the specific colors, type, logos, imagery, patterns, taglines, etc. of a brand makes sure the brand machine runs smoothly.

-Source: Canva

-Also see: PhotoADKing – Logo Maker

The basic purpose of a manual of style is to help you build your content. You can communicate the same message in multiple ways making our language more flexible. However, a style manual limits the difference and helps you concentrate on effectively transferring the message. When multiple people are working on a project or in an organization, its importance increases as people have different ways of communicating. A manual of style increases consistency throughout your content that helps build brand identity.

It is important even when you start a blog to build your brand name.

Define Your Brand Voice

It’s important to keep your company’s voice in mind when developing a style guide. Your brand’s voice should be established and referenced consistently to create an effective representation of your business values. It’s best to consider the messaging that you want customers to be exposed to, how they should feel after interacting with your materials, and the personality it should convey. Knowing this will make all other components of a style guide easier, such as determining font types, colors, spacing, etc.

Establish Messaging Guidelines for Different Audiences and Channels

A style guide should include guidelines on messaging for different audiences and channels. This will ensure that interactions with customers during all stages of their journey have the same consistent message. You need to define the messages that you want overall, but also the messages specific to each customer segment. It is essential to customize your message depending on the platform or audience you are addressing. Doing this ensures relevance and helps build a connection with customers across various platforms and engagements.

Determine How to Format Text and Images for Consistency

Consistency in style and formatting is an essential part of your business’s style guide. Having a clear definition of how to lay out text, create visuals and format images helps keep the representation of your brand on point. Outline the use of margins, font types, sizes, and spacing. Giving specific dimensions for visuals when sharing across social media or other platforms will ensure that all posts look cohesive. Providing guidance on how to format images with text overlaid on them is also necessary. Establish consistent rules for punctuation and capitalization as well as any acronyms you might use regularly.

Make Comprehensible Grammar Guidelines

Creating comprehensive grammar guidelines is key. For example, determine whether you should use an Oxford comma or address some of the more contentious issues like when to use “they” as a singular pronoun. Having these in place will ensure that no matter who is creating content on behalf of your business, they all have knowledge of which grammar rules to follow and when.

Establish Tone of Voice and Tone of Expression Standards Across the Board

Establishing a business’s tone of voice will help maintain a consistent message across all communication. The tone of voice is the overall feeling that is expressed through your word choice, syntax, and diction. It helps dictate the attitude and personality projected in your messaging. It can range from professional to playful, formal to friendly, or lighthearted to serious depending on the goals you have set for your brand. Establishing a set tone of voice upfront will ensure you are projecting your desired attitude in all of your content.

Technical writing style guide

Style guides help you write different kinds of content, such as API documents, writing an overview of complicated technical products, or explain how to use a product. Sometimes, these describe the ways to adapt the content based on your audience.

Most of them focus on the language style, such as tone of voice, style, and grammar. While, some add the structure of the documents, and provide the industry-wide best practices on managing content, versioning, delivery, and publishing strategies.

Even topics, like versioning, publishing, and delivery of content, seem out of the context. However, they help your audience to easily locate the content. It doesn’t matter how great your content is if it is not easily accessible.

Many Style guides sufficiently satisfy the main concerns of all technical documentation; sometimes, a more specialized guide is needed.

Here are some good prevailing style guides for technical writing:

• Microsoft Style guide or Microsoft Manual of Style (MSTP)
• The Chicago Manual of Style
• University of Oxford Style Guide
• DeveloperWorks editorial style guide by IBM
• The Red Hat Style Guide by Red Hat