If you run a business or work in the marketing department of a company that publishes any type of client-facing documents, you need an editorial style guide. Developing an in-house editorial style guide ensures that all documents, blog posts and marketing materials follow a specific standard for more cohesion and consistency in your brand.

Writing is far from straightforward. There are many different situations that support different (and all correct) uses of different writing elements—anything from numbers and percentages to how many lines a paragraph should have. 

Because there are so many ways to write and craft content, it’s important to not leave it up to the writer to do their own thing. If you have multiple different writers working on your branding material, then you must ensure they all write and publish consistently.

What to Include In your Editorial Style Guide

When developing your in-house style guide, it’s important to address may of the subjective parts of writing, making sure to set guidelines for these different aspects. In a style guide, there are three main categories of considerations to set standards for, including your brand voice, your style and your formatting.

Note: An editorial style guide is different from (but can be part of the same document as) a brand style guide. While the former is applied to written content, the latter is applied to designed content, like where and how to use things like logos, fonts and colors.

1. Brand Voice

Brand voice is less about the specific rules you’ll follow and more about the tone of the writing itself. How do you want the copy to sound? Formal and technical? Or causal and upbeat? When defining your brand voice in the editorial style guide, it’s important to include examples of approved copy so that people referring to the guide can clearly see the type of language that the brand uses to communicate with customers. Equally as important, include examples of phrasing or words to avoid.

For a more in-depth look at this process, review our 5-Step Guide to Developing a Brand Voice. This guide walks you through the process of finding and defining your brand voice and includes exercises you can do to flesh out your authentic tone.

2. Style

The “style” in style guide really refers to the writing, formatting and design standards you want your brand’s content to follow to ensure cohesion and conformity across all published assets. Writing is not just writing. Despite how many rules this field has, it’s actually a subjective art with lots of gray areas.

Having style guidelines will help you get clear on these gray areas where it’s about preference, rather than hard and fast rules. Your style guide will address issues like:

  • Are you going to write in American and British English? (This answer will be obvious for American and UK companies, but less obvious for Canadian, Australian or New Zealand companies who are also reaching American audiences)
  • Are you going to use a serial/Oxford comma or not? If not, when and how will you use commas when listing items?
  • How will you represent number ranges or percentages? (ex: 8 to 10 or 8-10; percent or %)
  • What title case will you use in your headings? 

Different brands have their own particular ways they want these items written to their audience. There’s no right or wrong answer—it’s just a matter of picking one way and sticking with it.

Here are the primary styles your brand can adopt: 

The most common styles in web content writing are AP and APA.

You can strictly adopt the entirety of one style, or you can blend rules from a few different ones to create your own style. If the latter is the case, then it’s even more important to develop your own editorial style manual for your brand to convey this assortment of different rules

3. Formatting

Formatting is an important aspect to have defined for your editorial team. In web publishing, readability is becoming an increasingly more crucial and valuable thing to focus on. Simple formatting standards can really help improve your readers’ experienced with the copy. 

You’ll want to land on formatting guidelines like:

  • When to use bullet or numbered lists and how often
  • How long paragraphs should be and how many paragraphs each section should have (a range is fine)
  • When to use H2s, H3s or even H4s
  • When to use bold and italics
  • How to highlight key information or snippets that stand out and break up text

Defining how you’ll format a blog post or webpage is crucial to developing a uniform reading experience for your audience. It also streamlines the content development process when there’s a standard way to format your pages.

Putting Together Your Style Guide

Now that you have your brand voice defined and your style rules solidified, the next step is to decide how you’ll document it and who you’ll share it with.

Work on it

All style guides are living documents, meaning they need to be reviewed regularly and updated as necessary. As such, it’s good to keep a working version of the guide in a format like a Google Doc. 

Designate one team member to be in charge of your editorial guidelines, such as your Editor-in-Chief or your Content Director. Make sure that a regular guide review is scheduled in, every six months to a year. As you acquire new good examples of brand voice being used, add these to the document too.

Brand it

An important reason to ensure your style guide is branded (that is, has your logo and company information in the header/footer) is because it’s likely going to be an outside document. Editorial style guidelines are used most frequently by people inside the company, but they’re also used by suppliers or contractors outside the organization. Freelance writers, advertising agencies and digital marketing consultants all need to refer to your editorial style guide in order to produce the best ad copy, blog posts or social media content. 

If your editorial style guide circulates, it’s crucial that it be branded, both to help the people using it keep their documents straight and to deter people from ripping off your work.

Share it

There’s no sense in spending the time developing your style guide if you aren’t going to share it with the people who can benefit from it. Make sure the people who need it always have access to the latest version of the guide. 

Keep the current version of the guide on a shared server. Depending on the size of your company and how many contributors you have, you might want to publish it on your website for anyone to access, like the Huffington Post and many other publishers do.

Editorial Style Guide Support

Needing an editorial style guide written but don’t want to take the time to develop it yourself? Healthy Content has years of experience working with various editorial style guides from many different brands. We know what should and shouldn’t go into a style guide and can help you compile a simple guide for your team.

Using a straightforward questionnaire and samples of your existing content, we’ll develop a professional, usable style guide that will help take your branding to the next level. Contact Healthy Content today to start your next project.