The importance of having a style guide

Despite the simplicity of its name, defining what a style guide is is not straightforward. And figuring out what it should contain is even worse. So let’s go straight to explaining the fundamentals.

What is a style guide?

In practice, it is a list of instructions that define your brand’s communication style. They range from mostly technical and formal aspects, such as linguistic choices, punctuation rules or when to employ acronyms or numbers, to concepts such as tone of voice, banned words, how to choose terms so that they are more or less inclusive toward certain categories of people, or how to manage communication across media (i.e.: communicating on TikTok is very different than communicating in a newsletter).

The result is a set of shared rules that make written communication uniform. We do not want to hide it: it is time-consuming and not always exciting. Yet it is one of the keys to content success: consistency allows clarity and makes texts more coherent and authentic in the eyes of readers, who will trust what you write and come back to you when they need to get information.

It also helps make your content recognizable: especially if you deal with mainstream topics, content recognition is key to distinguish yourself from your competitors and gain your readers’ loyalty.

The style guide is therefore a very powerful tool especially if you are working in a team, because it ensures that every member, whether it is a copywriter, a translator, a social media manager, a technical documentation author or a UX/UI writer, has references to create content that is in line with your brand’s identity and therefore it is consistent, regardless of the channels you use.

What should a style guide contain?

This question puts everyone on the spot, because there is no universal rule that defines what a style guide should contain. To decide what to include, you need to have a clear understanding of two things:

• Who you are, what you want to do and how you do it. Once you are perfectly clear about who you are and what you want to talk about, you need to figure out how to build a communication strategy that reflects your identity and the way you work. For example, if you are managing the content of your legal consulting firm for people who are not experts in the field, it will be best not to use terms that are too technical or at least you have to make sure you explain them in a simple way, perhaps writing shorter sentences.
• Who your audience is, what their communication style is, and what the form and content that captures and holds their attention is. For example, an information page that targets young people can be more successful and trusted if it avoids gender-biased expressions, uses “they/them” as pronouns when gender is not relevant, and in general uses language respectfully and inclusively, as these topics are highly felt by a young audience.

Having clarified these points, you can begin to think about what rules should support your communication strategy, reflect your identity, and at the same time resonate with your audience. The most frequent aspects to be outlined are:

• Text layout: how should your content be structured in terms of format? Header, footer, body... what fonts will you use? How big will the titles and subtitles be? When are bold, italic, and underlined used? What will bulleted and numbered lists, and tables look like, and how long should paragraphs be?
• Punctuation: can exclamation points be a good resource for your communication or is it better to avoid them? When are quotation marks used? What information should be included in brackets?
• Quotes: should quotes be enclosed in quotation marks (“” or «»), superscripts (‘’) or should they have a paragraph with a separate style? How will you reference the source?
• Numbers: which ones should be written in figures and which ones should be spelled out? How do you write ordinals? What is the format and spacing of units of measurement? Should they be adapted according to the language of the text? What is the date format and what separators do you want to use?
• People: will you use first and last name to refer to people? Are nicknames allowed? How do you talk about sensitive issues such as age, ethnicity, gender, and weight?
• Places: do you use official place names or do you prefer traditional ones (Bombay vs. Mumbai)? What is the format for addresses?
• References: how do you indicate internal references? What about external references?
• Translation: what should be translated? What should not be translated?
• Banned words, alternatives and phrases to be used.

This list offers insights about how to set up a style guide. There is no “complete” list: you decide what you want to regulate and how.

Once you have decided what points to cover, you only need to decide what the directions are and put them all together in a document. You can use several sources to create it:

• Language and punctuation manuals to define rules that are in line with language standards
• Style guides from other brands, associations, or institutions

How to format the style guide

The most common solution is to create a single document, with a number of sections and subsections, to be exported as a PDF and distributed to contributors. However, this format, although widespread, has many limitations, especially for those who need to consult it.

As a translation agency we have had the opportunity to consult dozens of style guides, always experiencing the same problem: the difficulty in quickly finding the information needed. “Traditional” style guides are like catalogs, in the form of very long PDF documents to browse through whenever you need something.

That’s what usually happens: as you are writing, you notice that you need to consult the style guide; so you open the document, check the table of contents to find the topic you are interested in, and finally scroll down the document to the page you need. When you need another piece of information, however, you have to go back up to the table of contents and then back down to the page. PDF format is also inconvenient in case you want to edit, update or remove instructions: you must have the original text document available at all times, edit it, export it to PDF, and then distribute the updated PDF to the entire team. This operation is time-consuming, not to mention the risk of several obsolete copies still circulating.

Traditional style guides are therefore a bit like when CDs did not yet exist: the most popular medium was the cassette tape, which you had to rewind every time you wanted to listen to a certain song. Tired of this process, at Qabiria we then tried to invent the “CD” of style guides.

The Ultimate Style Guide, Qabiria’s free style guide

So far our style guide for our contributors was in DokuWiki format, which partly solves some of the problems of the “traditional” PDF format. However, we knew it could be improved. So we looked for a more user friendly solution, where the instructions would actually be internalized by our translators for better, more consistent results. So we set to work and created The Ultimate Style Guide, the first style guide in Notion.

Therefore, the nature of this software allowed us to create a style guide in a database-like format, where information is more at hand. The content is that of a classic style guide, what changes is how you access the information: in addition to a clearer categorization and a more streamlined navigation, it immediately answers any question thanks to its search feature or its filters.

The strength of our style guide lies precisely in its interactivity, which, thanks to the filters, allows two levels of search.

Top down, as in any PDF document, that is by looking directly for the topic you need (e.g.: you need to understand how to handle an issue involving punctuation). Then you just need to click the appropriate section in the database, get directly to the page on punctuation, and search for what you need.

Or bottom up: let’s suppose that you are a social media manager who has just arrived at a new company. You need to find out what guidelines for your role are (because, for example, social media follows a different communication than the newsletter). Those who compile the style guide can apply categorizations to the pages, that way you only need to open the “social media” category to access a filtered selection of the style guide, which contains only the guidelines you need for your role.

Our style guide in Notion also solves the problem of updating information: being an online platform, your contributors will not have to download any documents, and any changes made to the guide are instant and global. They will then always have access to the most up-to-date version of the guide.

Another perk of using Notion is that any workspace can be shared, so we have created a template of our style guide and we are offering it for free to anyone who requests it.

Workspace content:

• Access to the style guide template, which you can duplicate in your account and use freely. In our style guide you will find a pre-filled structure with basic information, but it still remains a fully customizable document, from content to filters and categories.
• A section devoted to writing resources. You will find a list of all the most authoritative style guides available to the public, which you can consult when compiling your guide or when you have doubts on how to deal with particular areas. In fact, the list includes examples for handling the communication of sensitive topics such as inclusiveness and diversity, as well as more sector-specific guides such as those from National Geographic, Apple or the BBC. Among other resources you will also find a list of trade associations and very useful tools to check and improve your writing.

Our template then gives you the ability to build from scratch a style guide that will help you make your brand communication more consistent and more effective and win the trust and loyalty of your readers. In the template you will find many insights to start filling it out with your own rules: download it for free via the form below.