How to create a writing style guide
Bring your brand to life with this comprehensive reference tool for writers.
Key takeaways:
- A writing style guide ensures consistency in brand voice and messaging across all content, reinforcing brand identity and improving brand recognition
- By providing clear guidelines on grammar, punctuation, tone and style preferences, a writing style guide helps maintain clarity and cohesion in written communication, enhancing readability and comprehension.
- Creating a writing style guide empowers writers by providing them with a framework and reference tool to produce high-quality content.
How you talk about your healthcare organization is a vital part of your brand. Every word you choose could make the audience a customer or a critic. That’s why having a clear brand voice and tone is so important.
A writing style guide helps bring your brand voice to life. It allows anyone creating content for your organization to develop clear, consistent and on-brand communications.
What is a writing style guide?
A writing style guide is a reference tool that outlines specific rules and preferences for anyone creating content for your company to follow. It establishes a consistent style and ensures alignment with your brand voice and identity across all touchpoints — from web pages, blog articles and social posts to presentations and white papers.
How does a writing style guide differ from a brand guide?
A brand guide and a writing guide serve distinct but complementary purposes.
Purpose of a brand guide:
- It defines your brand’s visual identity, including logo use, typography, color palette, imagery, style and overall design aesthetic.
- It details your brand history, mission, values and brand positioning.
- It directs designers and others who create visual assets or materials for your brand.
For example, Target’s brand guide may detail its iconic red color, the specific font used in ads and guidelines for displaying its logo across different mediums.
Purpose of a writing style guide:
- It provides standards for all content, ensuring messaging consistency, clarity and effectiveness.
- It details rules for grammar, punctuation, capitalization, spelling, voice, tone, word choice and formatting.
- It directs writers, editors, content creators, public relations, marketing and sales teams, and anyone else producing content for your brand.
For example, your writing guide may specify whether to use “healthcare” (one word) or “health care” (two words) and your preferred plain language terms for complex medical information.
WG Content’s Content Director, Carol Williams, has seen hundreds of brand and writing style guides over the years and she’s noticed some similarities.
“One of the things I’ve noticed is that there’s often more focus on the visual branding style than on the content,” says Carol. “There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but if you’re working with a content company like us, we’re going to be focused on what you want to say about your brand, not just how you want it to appear.”
And when it comes to web writing style guides, she recommends letting it live within your overall writing style guide.
“In my opinion, the fewer separate documents, the better. After all, writing for the web is still about writing with your brand voice in mind. It’s just that the medium is different. We do have a separate brand guide from our writing style guide, but that’s to avoid making our brand guide too lengthy,” says Carol. “When it came to the nitty gritty of our writing style — like punctuation, capitalization, terminology, etc. — it worked to put all that in a separate document. Since the voice and tone of our brand stay the same in any medium, it makes sense to put any distinctions in our writing style for the web in the same space as our general writing style.”
Why do you need a writing style guide?
A writing style guide is important for building and maintaining a strong brand voice and identity.
Having a writing style guide helps ensure the following:
- Brand identity: The guide defines your brand’s unique personality, values and attributes through language.
- Clarity: The guide helps writers communicate complex healthcare information clearly and effectively to different audiences, including patients, healthcare professionals, investors and regulators.
- Compliance: The guide ensures that all content adheres to legal and regulatory requirements.
- Consistency: The guide establishes a uniform tone, voice and messaging across all content.
- Efficiency: The guide saves time and effort by providing writers with standardized guidelines and reduces the need for heavy editing and revisions.
A writing style guide empowers anyone creating content for your brand to produce consistent, high-quality and on-brand messaging.
And for healthcare organizations, a writing style guide can be even more important.
“Every organization has its nuances when it comes to their brand writing style. But there’s an added layer of complexity with healthcare organizations,” advises Carol. “Words — and even punctuation — that create confusion, leave room for misinterpretation or are vague, can leave a reader asking more questions than they get answers to. Worse yet, a lack of style guidelines can lead to inconsistent, jarring content that causes abrasion with audiences, who might just turn away from your brand.”
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How to create a writing style guide in 7 simple steps
1. Define your voice and tone
Your brand voice and tone — what you say and how you say it — are as much a part of your brand as your visual look and feel. A brand voice conveys your personality, whether that’s authentic, confident, conversational, empathetic or reassuring. The tone will vary based on the content type and channel. Both reinforce your brand values and allow you to connect more deeply with your audience.
Carol has some great advice to share about how WG Content defines the difference between voice and tone.
“You want to have the same voice and personality all the time (at least, you should — inconsistency breaks the brand). But tone is how you speak to people. When it comes to tone, it’s more versatile,” explains Carol. “For instance, you wouldn’t talk to a VIP at a fundraiser the way you would to a coworker at a baseball game. Your tone may be more formal with the VIP and more casual with the colleague.”
She adds, “At WG Content, our tone may shift based on the audience, medium or subject matter (e.g., personal email to a potential client vs. content for the informal company newsletter). But what doesn’t change is making sure audiences hear our authentic voice and personality in every communication.”
2. Define your editorial style
Choosing an editorial style to follow, such as AP Stylebook or Chicago Manual of Style, helps keep the rules in your guide specific to your company. Be sure to call out any exceptions to the style you follow.
3. Establish rules for grammar and punctuation
No one is a perfect writer. We can all get stuck on grammar rules and writing conventions we learned in school. Giving your team a resource where they can quickly find the details of grammar and usage goes a long way toward ensuring consistency and quality.
And remember: The details matter. They also illustrate your company’s brand voice. Punctuation and capitalization guidelines can include defining your headline style, adding clarity around the use of commas, and establishing rules about ampersands and starting sentences with conjunctions.
According to Carol, “The smallest elements are important elements — even when it doesn’t seem like they are — because, in the end, it’s all about helping to define your brand consistently and memorably. So, don’t overlook punctuation or the way you may spell certain words differently than AP style does (if, for instance, AP is the basis for the style you use). Get granular if it will help you establish your brand and make it easier and more efficient to write about it.”
4. Establish rules for formatting
The layout of your content helps a reader navigate through the material, increasing readability and comprehension. Formatting rules range from how you treat bullets to the use of boldface, italics and underlining. You may also have different rules for your website and videos than you do for traditional print or PDFs.
5. Create a glossary of key terms and usage
With all the medical jargon and acronyms in healthcare, you’ll want to include a glossary of terms, acceptable acronyms and preferred spelling and terminology. These guidelines ensure everyone uses terms the same way to minimize confusion for your audience.
6. Add plain language and health literacy guidelines
Healthcare language can be complicated and overwhelming. Your writers need to help your audience process and understand your message. Your guide can include common medical or healthcare terms and their standardized, plain language replacements. Clear language is also the foundation of ensuring accessibility.
7. Add a checklist for writers
As a helpful extra, include a checklist creators can review that asks questions like:
- Did you embody our values in your writing?
- Does what you wrote convey our brand voice?
- Does your tone fit the audience?
- Did you follow our style through the editing process?
Who should have access to the writing style guide?
Our survey showed that 68% of organizations use a writing style guide with external writers. But style guides are also essential for internal writing teams. Anyone crafting communications for you should use the writing style guide. Key stakeholders include:
- Communications
- Content creators and writers
- Customer service
- Design
- Executive leadership
- Human resources
- Marketing and sales teams
- Product development
- Public relations
Carol is quick to remind marketers to think about ensuring your final writing style guide is usable for internal writing teams and external partners.
“There’s nothing worse than a guide that makes a person flinch when they open it. In other words, simplicity and ease of use are desirable, no matter how complex your organization’s work may be,” says Carol. “Bullets, listicles, charts and paragraphs that are airy instead of dense go a long way to help the writer want to keep using the guide. Clear, real-world examples also align with the idea of practicality and simplicity.”
How do you let people know about the writing style guide?
Once you’ve developed your writing style guide, be sure your key stakeholders use it. Training helps them understand your writing style guide principles and know how to apply the rules effectively. Here’s how to make it come to life:
- Make it available: Be sure that anyone who writes for your team has access to the guide — whether they’re internal associates, freelance writers or agency partners. Email a PDF file to all those who need it and keep it on a shared server or intranet for real-time access.
- Hold a training session: Walk participants through the key elements, explaining the rationale behind notable guidelines and answering any questions they have.
- Offer resources and support: Establish a process, such as email, chat or a designated forum, for users to get help on style-related questions.
- Update it as needed: Your writing style guide will change over time, so appointing a person or team to review it each year is important. These reviews will ensure the guide is accurate, up-to-date and relevant to your company and customers.
AI assistants, ChatGPT and writing style guides
While using AI assistants like ChatGPT can be risky for writing, the technology is great for helping to make writing style guides more usable for your team.
Some common ways you can use AI with your writing style guide include:
- Use it for a consistency check: Ensure formatting, terminology and style guidelines are applied uniformly across content.
- Ask it to review for tone and voice: Get AI feedback on whether your content aligns with your brand’s personality.
- Quickly retrieve style rules: Instead of searching through a lengthy document, ask AI for specific formatting, punctuation or grammar rules.
- Assist with onboarding new writers: Use AI to answer common questions about your style guide, helping new team members adapt more quickly.
- Check for plain language compliance: Ensure content follows readability best practices, especially for healthcare communications.
“Now that our writing style guide is on our internal GPT, we’re saving time — as in, for example, no more hunting through the WG Content style guide for our phone number style (because it’s the little things that can give us the most grief!),” says Carol. “Now we can enter the question, ‘How does WG Content format phone numbers?’ and in just seconds, we’ve got our answer. We call our in-house GPT Genie because, to us, it’s kind of magical!”
Want to learn more about creating your own custom GPT or AI assistant? That’s exactly what we do with WGC Catalyst. Reach out to learn more.
Do you need help creating a writing style guide?
Outlining all the guidelines, rules and best practices for writing and communications takes time and attention to detail. But it’s vital to the way your audience perceives your brand. WG Content can help. And if you need an agency to bring your content to life — we can do that too.
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