How to Create a Style Guide

Creating a style guide for your brand is critical for the consistency and professionalism of your content. Fortunately, you don’t have to create a content style guide entirely from scratch, as there are already popular writing style guides that can serve as a foundation.

In this article, we’ll explore six essential steps for creating and distributing a content style guide that helps your content be clear, consistent, and accurately reflect your brand.

Key Takeaways (TL;DR)

1. Assess your brand and goals, including brand voice and content style.
2. Choose a popular style guide (e.g. APA, MLA, AP, or Chicago) as your foundation.
3. Establish clear guidelines for brand voice and tone.
4. Create document standards for visuals and formatting.
5. Define specific rules (such as whether AI tools are, or are not permitted).
6. Implement, distribute, and maintain your style guide.

Discover a suite of best-in-class editorial tools with the Originality.ai Grammar Checker, AI Checker, and Content Optimizer.

Step 1: Assess Your Brand Goals

A style guide is more than just a series of grammar and formatting rules; it is a reflection of your brand’s voice, personality, and core values. 

In preparation for creating your style guide, thoroughly assess your brand and its aspirations. Consider things like:

• Brand voice: How would you describe your brand in a few words?
• Audience insight: Do you know what style your audience prefers?
• Inspiration: Which brands have style elements you admire?
• Content and style audit: What is currently working/not working, and why? 
• Team consensus: Does the full team agree/align on brand messaging?

From the outcomes of this assessment, set clear goals for what you want your style guide to accomplish. 

Whether it’s creating more consistent messaging, improving content quality, or aligning content better with your brand, this first step guides the rest of your process and determines its success.

Step 2: Choose a Popular Style Guide as a Foundation

Fortunately, the practice of writing for consistency, clarity, and accuracy has been around for a while. That means there are several popular style guides that publishers, writers, and editors can use and build on.

These well-known guides are regularly updated and cover everything from grammar to typography and usage to formatting. Each major style guide has its target audiences, though their uses aren’t limited to any one field.

Examples include: 

• The Associated Press Stylebook (AP Style): Journalism, news writing, public relations, marketing
• Chicago Manual of Style (Chicago): Book publishing, academic journals, long-form writing
• Oxford Style Manual/New Hart’s Rules: Publishing, especially British English
• The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage: Major newspapers
• Modern Language Association (MLA): Academics (humanities and language arts)

These are some of the big names in style guides. 

Still, there are many other specialized guides, such as the American Medical Association (AMA) for health sciences and the American Psychological Association (APA) for social sciences and education, among many others. 

Depending on your industry and brand, select a major style guide that will serve as the basis for your brand style guide, providing guidelines, rules and advice for basic grammar, punctuation, usage, and formatting.

The guide you choose is just a basis for the specialized guide you’ll create that fits your brand’s unique needs. 

Step 3: Establish Guidelines for Brand Voice and Tone

Now, the customization of your content style guide begins, starting with brand voice and tone. 

The foundation style guide will provide general guidelines for grammar and formatting, while your brand voice will help tailor the guide to your unique brand personality and communication style with your audience. 

Spell out the intricacies of these characteristics for users of the guide: 

• Brand voice attributes: List the traits that describe your brand personality.
• Explain voice vs. tone: Brand voice is constant, while tone adapts to context, channel and situation. Define both clearly, and provide examples.
• Provide examples of dos and don’ts: The more you illustrate voice and tone in action (correct and incorrect examples), the better.
• Address language specifics: Include preferences for person and point of view (first-person “I/we” vs. second-person “you”), active vs. passive voice, acronyms, jargon, etc. 

As you create and refine your guide, remember to include plenty of examples of incorrect and correct usage throughout. Examples are a great reference when users consult the guide for applying brand standards. 

Step 4: Document Standards for Visuals and Formatting

While visual elements like logo usage, color palette, and typography choices are typically covered in a separate brand guide, your content style guide should reference key visuals that impact written content. 

This creates consistency in how text and visuals work together in all your content. Clearly define the guidelines for:

• Image usage: Create clear direction for on-brand imagery, proper sourcing, sizing, citing, and other best practices. 
• Formatting templates: Provide clear instructions and structures for blog posts, emails, social media posts, and other content types
• Accessibility standards: Include guidance for alt text on images, proper heading readability, and descriptive link text, for instance.

Including these standards in your brand’s writing style guide helps everyone in the content creation process remember how visuals and text work together to best represent the brand and serve the reader. 

Step 5: Define Specific Rules and Exceptions

Your brand style is bound to have a few exceptions from your chosen foundational guide at times or require further guidance than it provides. 

Clearly outline any and all instances that contradict the popular style guide and provide any brand- or industry-specific information that needs to be included in your guide, such as:

• Industry terminology, terms and definitions
• Product naming 
• Acronyms and abbreviations
• Company numbers and data
• SEO optimization and best practices
• Guidance on the use of AI tools and AI detection

You might also choose to include guidance on specific parts of the content creation and editorial workflow, such as:

• Editing process and review flow
• Document version control
• Metadata requirements
• Document organization and sharing

In this step, you are compiling and organizing any details that put the finishing touches on your guide to make it speak for your brand’s style, voice, and process. 

Step 6: Implement, Distribute, and Maintain Your Style Guide

Once you have all the parts of your style guide, it’s essential to put it together in a way that ensures it is helpful to your intended audience and the whole content team. 

It’s critical to get insight from everyone involved so you can refine and organize the guide so it benefits those who will use it most.

• Choose the right format:  Whether it is a shared document, a PDF with hyperlinks, or posted on an internal portal, make sure your style guide is accessible to everyone, wherever they work. 
• Create or link to supplemental resources: Help your team use the style guide by making it easy for them to connect to training or resources that expand upon important concepts. 
• Establish workflow and governance: Make sure everyone knows who to contact with style questions or suggestions for the guide.
• Review and update regularly: Style guides are living documents that adapt as the brand and audience evolve. 
• Encourage feedback and suggestions: Team insight is essential for the style guide as it evolves and grows. Ensure everyone feels comfortable sharing their ideas. 

By treating your content style guide as an ongoing project rather than a static document, you maintain its relevance and value to your team. 

Final Thoughts

Putting together a comprehensive writing style guide takes time and careful thought, but it pays off in the long run, through consistent content, stronger brand recognition and more effective connection with your audience.

The best style guides balance confident guidance with flexibility to let creativity shine through even the strictest style rules. 

While there should be a specific person or small team responsible for maintaining and updating the guide, the whole content team should have a part in reviewing and providing insight so it remains a helpful, relevant, and, above all, consistently used tool. 

Get a suite of best-in-class editorial tools with the Originality.ai Grammar Checker, AI Checker, and Content Optimizer.

Then, learn more editing best practices:

• Editorial Workflow: 7 Ideas to Supercharge Productivity
• Content Editing vs. Copy Editing — A Comparative Guide
• What Is Line Editing?