In celebration of our tenth birthday this year, we decided to see if we could come up with 10 topics we’ve learnt 10 things about in those 10 years. During that time we’ve worked with many clients in small organisations, or who only have a few people working on communications, and a topic that comes up time and time again is the need for a house style guide.
A house style guide is simply a list of rules about writing, specific to your organisation. It can be anything from a single page to a brochure and should include guidance on word usage, spelling, formatting and punctuation, as well as clarification about aspects of writing that have no hard and fast rules.
We work to our own internal house style and have developed many specific style guides for clients – so, here are 10 things we’ve learnt about house styles along the way.
1. They help to create consistency
Most of the time you will want your content to look and sound as though it’s been written by the same person and reflects your brand and style. As your business grows and more people get involved in written communications, a style guide will help ensure your organisation has a consistent ‘voice’, which will support a reputation for professionalism and reliability.
2. They speed things up
Having all the answers in one place can save a lot of time when it comes to needing a quick reference or refresher. With everyone following the same guide, less time should be needed for editing and reviewing.
3. They help set the tone
How you write can say a lot about your business as a whole. For example, if you choose to use lots of contractions and start sentences with ‘And’ and ‘But’, your business will come across as more modern and friendly; if you’re going for a more formal, authoritative image, then it’s probably more appropriate to write in a traditional style.
4. They’re best done with a template
If you do decide to write your own house style guide, we recommend starting with an existing guide as a template. The AP Stylebook and the Chicago Manual of Style are two of the best known, but all major newspapers have one, and you can access these online.
5. They should clarify preferred spellings
Are you going to use OK, okay or ok? Learned or learnt? Acknowledgment or acknowledgement? It’s useful to decide whether you’ll be using UK or US English, and which dictionary is going to be your default reference (e.g., the Oxford English Dictionary, Cambridge Dictionary or Mirriam-Webster).
6. They can deal with hyphenation
This can be a bit of a tricky area, as there’s little ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ to base your decision upon. However, it’s still worth thinking it over and including notes about your preference in your style guide to make sure your work is consistent. For example, is it email or e-mail? Online or on-line? Health-care or healthcare?
7. They should cover capitalisation
Although the grammatical rules of capitalisation are clear, many people like to capitalise certain words which grammatically don’t need to be. We believe the most important thing is to be consistent, so your house style guide should set out your approach to capitalising terms such as job titles, departments, teams and collective or common nouns related to your organisation, such as ‘trust’, ‘association’ or ‘university’.
8. They can include formatting rules
How do you format book or journal titles? Do you prefer justified or left aligned text? How much space should there be before and after paragraphs? How big should headings be? Again, there is no right or wrong answer here but it’s important to be consistent (although if you want your communications to be easy to read, we recommend left aligning copy as this keeps the spacing between words even, which makes it easier for the brain to process).
9. They can talk about punctuation
Are you going to use the Oxford comma? Are you going to follow a colon with a capital letter? Will you use single or double quote marks? How will you format your bullet points?
10. They need to be shared far and wide
Once your guide is ready, remember to tell your team about it and explain its importance. Keep it somewhere central so that everyone can access it and encourage everyone who writes for your business to read it and refer back to it as necessary. Your comms team and anyone likely to be regularly producing written content (customer service teams, for example) will need a detailed run through and perhaps some additional training on some of the points.
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