At many of the small businesses I’ve worked with, I’ve created a style guide for company communications. Without this intentional push, it is all too easy for customer-facing comms to be plagued with inconsistencies in punctuation and capitalization (to name only a few), which can negatively impact a user’s trust in the brand.
To produce a consistent end-to-end experience for the user it’s important to develop standards, processes, and guidelines that help teams scale quality writing and do better work.
Below is an example of a style guide I created for NaliniKIDS.
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BACKGROUND
When different members of the team produced work product, they each used their own style of writing, their own font choice, and their own ideas of proper punctuation. We needed to get everyone singing from the same song book.
THE IDEA
Inspired by the branding guidelines our graphic designer created, I developed a ‘Communications Style Guide.’ The style guide defined voice, tone, established terminology, proper styling of product names, and established terminology as well as declared which punctuation/grammar rules the organization would abide by.
WHAT I DID
- Audited all communications to identify largest probelm areas/consistent issues.
- Interviewed team members to establish what writing-related questions and issues they had, as well as noted style preferences.
- Researched standards and best practices of comparable organizations.
- Developed guide to deliver generic guidance (grammar, punctuation, capitalization, etc.) as well as guidance for things specific to our organization (terminology, words to use/not use). Included examples for each guideline to show what to do and what not to do.
Here is a snippet of the guide:
