Do you need a style guide?

When looking at which services an editor or writer provides, you may see “create a style guide” as one of the options. Do you need one? There are a few things to consider before you decide.

What’s a style guide?

Basically, a style guide defines the standards to follow when writing, formatting or designing content. It can be one page (these are often called style sheets), several pages, or book-length. Book-length style guides are often called style manuals.

A guide ensures that anyone creating content for your organization is following a consistent set of guidelines. It gives your audience a consistent experience of your brand and helps create an overall polished look and feel to your content whether its online or in print.

Common style guides

If you have a post-secondary education, you may remember your professors asking you to follow Chicago or APA style for your references and citations.

Some common ones include:

• Associated Press (AP) Stylebook – an American style guide for journalists.
• APA style – used in the sciences, includes handling tables and figures
• Canadian Press Stylebook – used by Canadian journalists as well as many Canadian business
• The Canadian Style – the Canadian government guide
• The Chicago Manual of Style – widely used across many fields, including academia
• MLA Style – used in the humanities, focuses on documenting your sources

Nearly every professional or academic field will have a standard style guide. As well, which country you’re doing business in could influence which style guide you use. Canadian spelling, grammar and style is different from American and British but shares many features of both.

Why create a custom style guide

You probably don’t need to go to the trouble of creating a book-length style guide. Generally, you can choose to use one of the common style guides.

However, if your organization uses specific language or has many product names or you have a preference for how your content is formatted, you could create a short style guide or style sheet in addition to specifying which style manual you want content creators to use. It will help prevent a lot of back and forth between you and your content creator, especially if you rely on freelancers rather than an in-house team to create your content.

Need a custom style guide?

I’d be happy to help you create a style guide for your organization. Let’s talk.