by An easy way to make your writing stand out is to ensure it's consistent in style. A style guide is a must-have communications asset.
Reading time: 1.5 minutes | By Lee Ellwood
Consistency across your written communication has important advantages. It demonstrates your organisation's professionalism, and it makes your communication more effective.
Inconsistency in spelling, word form, tense, abbreviations or any other aspect of a text interrupts and distracts your reader. It makes them stop for a split-second to think about what's wrong.
But you don't want them to be interrupted. You don't want your audience to be distracted from what you're saying. You want them to be totally engaged with what you're saying, and to stay engaged.
Inconsistency also detracts from a professional image. If you can't get your own writing looking schmick, how can potential customers or clients believe that your business actually IS schmick?
A style guide is the answer.
What's a style guide?
It's a simple Word or PDF document that records all the decisions you make about your organisation's preferred ways of styling your writing.
For example: the headings in this post use sentence case, which has a capital on the first word but not the others. That's currently the preferred convention in Australia, and it's our personal style preference, too. But for your business's communications, you might like to capitalise all the major words.
EllWords is an Australian business owner, so we use Australian spelling, style conventions and word usage. But if you deal with a lot of people in the USA, you'd adopt -ize and -or spellings instead of -ise and -our.
Our designer chosen this font ('Poppins') for our web text. You might prefer Arial or Calibri or Times New Roman or something else.
A style guide is the place to record all your preferences and decisions about styling text. You could also include your branding elements, too.
How to get a consistent style
Compiling a style guide is a service we offer as professional editors. The EllWords team will work with you to identify or choose all the style elements you'd like for your communications, then we'll compile them into one document. A searchable PDF with links between sections works well for most situations.
We could start with an existing, published Australian style guide, such as the Australian Government Style Manual, for the major style decisions. We'd then add any organisational preferences, such as word forms pertinent to your field of work.
Once your style guide is developed and in place, you'll have a permanent resource for all your employees to consult. You can also refer your freelance creatives to it when they work for you. Almost instantly, your written communication will begin to look consistent, cohesive and professional.
A personalised style sheet doesn't take much time or money to establish. But the impact on your professional image and your communication engagement will be long-lasting.
If you're interested in boosting your purpose-led organisation's professional look with a tailored style guide, contact us today.
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