5. Creating and Maintaining a Style Guide

Your discussions over the correct use of words and language in copy can be greatly helped if you have a style guide to refer to. Style guides are intended to provide guidance on general language use and advice on specific areas such as industry-related jargon or acronyms. They are important not just in internal communications, but also in most other areas of publishing, from web content to magazine and newspaper writing.

Most large, established companies already have some form of in-house style guide, particularly if they publish a fair amount of material. However, there may be occasions where you are required to develop one yourself; or where the existing style guide is inadequate (for example, because it is mainly concerned with the way the corporate logo should be portrayed) and you have to extend or adapt it. Putting together a comprehensive style guide can take days or even weeks, but is worth it in terms of resolving issues over the correct use of terms in corporate materials.

The aim of a style guide is to ensure consistency in written materials, so when compiling a guide you need to consider all areas of writing that may be open to interpretation. Examples of things to cover include:

• General language issues: does the company use UK or US spelling? Is the writing style to be formal and sophisticated or informal and chatty?
• Names and titles: are people referred to by their first names or last names? Are titles capped up or lower case? How is the business referred to?
• Locations: how does the business refer to its subsidiaries, trading regions and so on?
• Numbers: when are numbers spelt out? When are they written in numerals? How do you write monetary amounts, millions and so on?
• Abbreviations: do you write ‘per cent’ or ‘%’? Which corporate or industry abbreviations are well known enough to be used routinely?
• Brand names: how are they spelt and written?
• Slogans and special notices: are there any texts (often called ‘strap-lines’) that have to be associated with brand names or with particular types of copy?
• Special words: are there any words or phrases that have special use or are to be avoided?

If you are writing a style guide from scratch, it may help to use an existing newspaper guide for reference; you can buy copies of the style guides used by major papers like the Financial Times or The Times. It is also useful to hang on to copies of style guides that you may come across in your work for clients.

Chapter 8 in this book contains pointers on a number of areas that you will probably want to include.

Once you have drafted a guide, you will probably need to get your client to approve it. This can be a useful process, helping your client understand the importance of having a professional copywriter on board but also giving you valuable insights into the way that the business you are working with thinks about and refers to itself.