How To Create A Content Style Guide

Unlike PR or academic writing, which have established and commonly accepted styles, most content marketing programs don’t follow a standardized style guide.

Content marketers or content leaders who don’t ascribe to a specific style guide must eventually create a style guide that outlines their preferences. Of course, being familiar with the commonly accepted style guides can help you more easily create your own and describe it to others, such as freelance writers or editors. We commonly hear statements like “MLA but without the Oxford comma.” 

At EditorNinja, we believe so strongly in having a style guide that we require every new account to provide one. If you don’t have one, we’ll gladly provide ours while you create one of your own. You can also choose to use ours (the default MLA style, the first option in this guide).

We’re often asked, “What belongs in a style guide?” when the customer doesn’t already have one. This happens more often than expected, so we polled our editors to ask them what they need included in a style guide to do their job effectively.

What to include in your content style guide

Our editors say they need the following attributes in a style guide.

1. Type of Content

First, include the type of content being created. If you have multiple types of content, then define the styles for each type. For example, blog articles and white papers may have the same style, but press releases use AP.

1. Types of content written (blog articles, tool comparisons, etc):
   1. Blog Articles
   2. Other Articles (like resource content)
   3. Press Releases
   4. Research Papers
   5. Books 
   6. Theses 
   7. Other

2. Tone and Voice

Tone and voice are largely similar across B2B companies, but taking some time to think through how you want your content to come across and for editors to check can pay big dividends in terms of content consistency and conversion. 

1. Brand’s Voice and Tone:
   1. Casual and conversational articles are meant to be educational while conveying a sense of familiarity to the reader. 
   2. Thought leadership with some unpopular but educated opinions that shows deep expertise and that our brand is the trusted provider.

3. Fonts, Font Size, Heading Size, Margin Size

For most digital publishing, fonts, font size, heading size, and margin size are defined using your website style sheets, or CSS, and applied across the website. Other types of content, especially content published in print, such as a magazine or brochure, will have tighter specifications for that content.

If your publishing is all digital, simply saying “Determined by website styles” should be enough because the website’s style sheet formats it correctly. Still, it’s usually helpful to see the article properly formatted wherever it was drafted before it’s added to the website, so prescribing these in the writer and editor’s guides can be helpful.

If the document is meant to be printed, specify these so the editor can check them and the designer, who does the final setting and formatting, can follow them.

1. Font, font size, heading size, margin size:
   1. Arial Font
   2. 11pt Font
   3. Double Space
   4. 1-inch margins

       

4. Grammar, Capitalization, and Tenses

Grammar, capitalization, and tense are some of the most common styles defined in style guides, as they help maintain content consistency across multiple writers, editors, and even teams within a company. Agencies should also have a default style that they give to writers and editors, though priority should be given to a client’s style guide if they have one.

Common specifications include:

1. Heading case
   1. Title – This Is a Title
   2. Sentence – This is a title
2. Other formatting essentials:
   1. Oxford comma 
   2. Bullet point 
   3. Correct spelling of BRAND NAME (for example, “Our brand is EditorNinja, with no space between Editor and Ninja.”)
   4. Em or en dashes, or no dashes at all, and semicolons or parentheses should be used.
3. Which person/tense each piece should be in:
   1. Second tense 
   2. Past tense
4. Grammar preference (US vs UK English):
   1. US English
5. Passive Voice is ok or not
   1. Passive voice is not used in the vast majority of content, but is completely a stylistic choice.

The Most Common Issues Editors Encounter in Style Guides

When I asked our editors what else they’d want you to know about creating a style guide, they mentioned that they most commonly have these questions for clients. If they’re included in a style guide, the editor does better work with less back-and-forth with you.

• Oxford comma or not, 
• Formatting of US/USA, 
• Heading/subheading cases for digital articles (not research papers), and 
• Any preferred spelling quirks like Internet vs. internet, email vs. e-mail, inhouse vs in-house, etc.