What Is A Style Guide?

A style guide is a document or set of guidelines that specifies how citations, footnotes, grammar, punctuation, and other grammatical functions are used in nonfiction writing. Fiction rarely follows a specific predetermined style guide, though it may have its preferences and, therefore, a guide to keep styles consistent throughout the document.

There are five standard style guides (in alphabetical order):

1. AMA — American Medical Association – Used in medical research and healthcare writing.
2. AP— Associated Press – Used primarily in journalism and news writing.
3. APA— American Psychological Association – Most commonly used in academic writing within the social and behavioral sciences. 
4. Chicago — The Chicago Manual of Style – Used in books and academic journals, particularly within the humanities and social sciences.
5. MLA— Modern Language Association – Primarily used in humanities disciplines like literature, philosophy, history, and the arts. 

These are most commonly used for the specific types of writing specified above but are not usually used for marketing purposes in web content, such as blog articles. Instead, most companies write their own personalized style guides that use pieces of these standard guides for reference.

Why You Need a Style Guide

When a company or agency does not use a standard style guide, it should create one for writers, editors, and internal teams.

Here are a few reasons why:

1. Reduce the amount of time required to produce a publish-ready piece.
2. Minimize the back-and-forth between strategists, managers, writers, editors, and anyone involved.
3. Publish more consistent content faster, which improves business results faster.
4. Retain good writers and editors who value clear guidelines so they can do their best work.
5. If working with outside vendors or freelance contractors, have an efficient method of communication to begin the relationship on a positive note.

A style guide is the best way to guarantee that content remains consistent across writers, editors, and marketing teams. A good style guide includes details on:

• Tone and voice
• Grammar
• Spelling of brand names, titles, and more
• Industry terminology
• Formatting

Large Companies & Multiple Style Guides

Large companies may have multiple style guides, one for each section of their website. 

For example, a style guide may exist for the blog and its content (which would ask for long-form content, playful language, and lots of images), another for Resource-style content (short content, punchy language, no photos or images), and yet another for public-facing content like press releases, which require strict adherence to a specific style (in the case of press releases, AP style).

Large companies often have multiple style guides. These include everything you need to know about a brand and producing content for it, including colors and fonts. Brand guidelines differ significantly from editorial style guides and often contain more information than your editor needs.

Here are the basics of what your editor needs to do their work:

• The types of content being created
• Examples of existing content that meet the brand quality standards
• The tone and voice of the brand
• Fonts and font sizes,
• Grammar, capitalization, and tense guidelines
• Any special considerations for content (i.e., don’t mention this competitor, how to spell the brand, etc.)

Large companies should create a specific editing style guide for their outsourced editors, complete with the information above. This document should be considered a living document that you update over time as you grow. This will help editors follow and keep up with changing guidelines.

Agencies & Style Guides

Every agency should have a style guide because agencies create content at scale for many clients. However, if our experience at EditorNinja holds true, most agency clients don’t have a style guide of their own, which means quality will be variable at best.

The lack of a cohesive style guide for agency clients does a disservice to both sides of the engagement. Why? Two reasons:

1. Clients receive content that is not in line with their style guide, which means they either need to edit it or send it back for revision;
2. Agencies receive more revision requests and thus work more hours than necessary. Work that is not up to client quality standards harms their reputation, and clients churn more than they should.

Some, though not all, of this is solved by having a default style guide for content.

A style guide helps your content provider produce initial content that is more in line with your and your client’s requirements. The style guide can also be shared with each client and adjusted to their unique needs, giving them confidence that they’ve hired the right agency. 

If the client has a style guide, this is a great opportunity to ask them to share it with you so you can write content that meets their needs from the start.

Style Guides are Living Documents

People ignore style guides because they’ve had bad experiences with unused documentation in their organization. Documentation becomes outdated, isn’t followed by others, and generally feels like a waste of time to create in the first place. 

I’ll challenge this by saying that style guides are not documentation. Style guides are more akin to briefs, which outline what should be created, not what has been made.

That difference is important. Guidelines change over time as the brand changes, so new content needs to shift with those ever-evolving needs. The style guide should be provided to everyone involved in creation, especially writers and editors, in an easily updated format.

We recommend turning on Google Docs Notifications (Tools -> Notification Settings -> Added or Removed Content) so that writers and editors are alerted when something changes.