What is an Editorial Style Guide?
An editorial style guide is a document that guides your writers and content marketing team members on how to write content for your company. These guidelines help ensure that all published content is grammatically correct and on-brand.
An editorial style guide is a valuable resource for your brand and can save your marketing team time. It can also prevent inconsistencies from creeping into your writing and editing process.
Style manuals
An editorial style guide is a document that contains important rules and guiding principles that ensure a company’s written content remains consistent and on-brand. These manuals are useful for writers and editors in all areas of content creation, from websites and social media to video production and print.
These guides are a crucial part of every business’s editorial process. They address common questions before they arise, keeping your team on the same page and ensuring your content is consistently high quality.
The most common style guides include the Associated Press (AP), Chicago Manual of Style, American Psychological Association (APA), and Modern Language Association (MLA). They provide recommendations for grammar, spelling, punctuation and usage, plus topical guidance for topics like cultural trends and news media.
When choosing a style guide, consider the nature of your writing and the audience you’re reaching. For example, academic writers use APA and MLA more than business or marketing writers. Similarly, AP is a good choice for news publications, while MLA is more suitable for blogs and websites dedicated to academia.
A style guide also addresses formatting requirements and identifies preferred styles for bulleted lists, block quotes, sentence spacing and more. It should also address the nuances of common usage — for example, a hyphen in “e-mail” and capitalization of brand names like eBay or IKEA.
A good style guide should be updated regularly to reflect new feedback from editors and internal inquiries, as well as broader changes in your branding. It should be an essential tool for your in-house team and freelancers to use when creating content.
Formatting requirements
A style guide documents the language rules that should be followed in your company’s written content. It’s a crucial resource that all marketing team members and partner agencies can refer to, helping them maintain brand consistency across all their work.
It’s important for you to establish a writing style that works well for all the different types of content that you create, from white papers to blog posts. It’s also necessary to define how your content should be formatted, so that it’s easy to read and understand for your audience.
An effective style guide prioritizes customers by ensuring a unified voice, consistent use of language and identifiable personality. It can help readers form a real connection with the content and build brand recognition that will result in increased sales.
The first section of your style guide should list answers to common questions that writers might ask before starting their projects. This will help new employees, freelancers and contractors get on the same page faster and save you time in the future as they continue creating content for your business.
You can also include an inclusive language section to encourage all members of your company to write for everyone. This can be a very effective strategy, as long as you have a clear set of goals for including all voices in your marketing material.
Another important part of a style guide is the section on citing research and data. This can be an especially confusing aspect of the writing process, so it’s essential to ensure that your writers know how to cite their sources properly and are not left wondering what they should do.
The format for your research may vary, but it is a good idea to provide guidelines in this section that are based on Modern Language Association (MLA) standards. This will make it easier for your writers to cite their sources and avoid confusion with other publications, which can lead to inaccurate attributions or incorrect information.
Grammar rules
There are many rules of thumb to be found when it comes to proper grammar and punctuation. Keeping your writers on the right track means less snarky comments and more quality content. The best way to do it is to create a solid set of etiquette guidelines that will be followed by all. A good starting point is to have your writers a list of what are considered to be the top grammar rules, including correct spelling and punctuation, capitalization and proper use of hyphens, conjunctions and modifiers. Having an editorial style guide in place will save you time, money and a lot of headaches down the road. For starters, your writers will be able to keep up with the competition and avoid a plethora of typos.
Style and tone
When you’re creating a style guide, one of the first things to consider is your voice and tone. These are the attitudes you adopt when writing, which influence how readers respond to your work. You need to understand your tone and style to write a consistent message that’s effective for your brand.
A writer’s style is determined by many choices about diction, sentence structure, detail, dialogue, literary devices, and rhythm. They also use these elements to create a story’s mood or atmosphere.
Some writers have a very “raw” style that is very direct, while others prefer to use longer, more elaborate sentences and figurative language. A news journalist, for example, may use a very different style than a blog writer or a fiction author.
The choice of a writer’s style is affected by their personality, the type of work they do, and their audience. For instance, a blog writer may have an approach that’s more friendly than a news reporter would.
When writing for a business, you might need to create a style that’s more formal than the way you might address customers in a personal email. However, you might want to be more informal if you’re writing for a community group or social media page.
In addition to a style guide, you might have other types of content guides that cover topics such as grammar rules, formatting requirements, or industry standards. These can be valuable resources for your content team to refer to.
When you’re drafting your style guide, include examples of the concepts you’re discussing in a visual format with callouts to explain what you’re talking about. This will make it easier for new writers to understand the guidelines.
Research
Whether you’re a small business or a large corporation, establishing consistent language in all of your content is a must. Especially for online content like blog posts, video and social media, inconsistencies are bound to occur if no clear writing style guide is in place.
A style guide is a set of rules and guiding principles that ensure a company’s brand content is consistent, on-brand and grammatically correct. It’s an essential tool for marketing professionals, from in-house employees to freelancers and agencies, and is meant to be a single, easy-to-access document.
Research is a crucial part of the process of creating an editorial style guide. It helps you identify the specific needs of your brand and its audience.
For example, if your brand is in the medical or academic market, you may want to include a section on grammar and style requirements. This includes capitalization, punctuation, dates and numbers, abbreviations, and formatting.
You can also include provisions on citing sources, which should be clearly laid out to writers. This could include an explanation of what is and isn’t acceptable to use, including competitors or unreliable resources.
Another essential component is the word style section, which provides a list of words to avoid and specific word styles. This can help prevent over-used or industry jargon from creeping into your brand’s content.
It’s also helpful to include a personas section, which includes information about your target audience and how they interact with your product or service. This can help writers understand what their readers want from your brand, how to address their pain points and provide value.
