Style guide
Style guide - first draft ready and available
We have a model style guide that we can tailor for your organisation. Versions of our guide are already being used at AMP Limited, National Australia Bank and Freehills.
The guide:
- works as an inspiring and practical tool to help your writers learn about writing
- sets out how the "voice of your brand" is crucial to your brand and to your strategy
- reflects and supports our training courses.
We recommend that your guide includes examples of "before and after" rewrites of real-life samples of the documents in your organisation. These examples need to:
- be marked-up to show the ways in which the original is insufficiently clear for your branding and your objectives
- be rewritten to show your preferred style
- demonstrate just how clearly your organisation expects its people to write.
Your style guide should also refer your people to other model documents that are available on the organisation's intranet. We can help you prepare those other documents.
Tailoring the guide to suit your organisation
Reworking our style guide to suit your needs is faster and simpler than creating a document from scratch.
We would rework our existing document by:
- removing irrelevant material
- blending in relevant material from any existing style guide or manual your organisation uses or is governed by
- replacing examples with examples relevant to your organization
- creating a new document for your organization.
We would deliver that draft for your review and produce a second draft based on your review of the first draft. After you have circulated the document we would prepare a final version based on that wider review.
The politics of a style guide (believe it or not)
Some people can be precious about style guides and passionate about their particular linguistic, grammar or punctuation preferences. These firmly-held positions can make finalising and introducing a style guide a tricky process.
Introducing the Words and Beyond style guide is not a tricky process. We help you deal with those people and their entrenched positions. And we recognise that the document is your document, so you have control over its contents.