5 key things you need in your company’s style guide
A writing style guide for you business is an essential tool for building consistency and a standard of professionalism across all your written communication, but it’s also an important way to bring your brand to life in the written word.
A writing style guide is not your brand guidelines. Your brand guidelines may touch on language, but they are more likely to be about colours, fonts, and logos than the nitty gritty of elements like how you talk about your customers or your business, what you capitalise and don’t capitalise, or terminology unique to your business or sector. This is where the writing style guide comes in - it should answer all those questions and more!
After writing style guides for a number of different organisations over the years, we’ve come to know the key elements that should be included to make it easy for everyone to speak your language. Here’s a few of the top guidelines you should include.
1 How you refer to your business
Giving your people clear guidelines on how to refer to your business is a crucial part of building and protecting your brand. For example, are you a ‘business’, ‘company’, or an ‘organisation’? An ‘organisation’ might be more suitable for a non-profit, but not suitable for an insurance business, for example.
2 How you refer to your customers and people
Are your customers ‘clients’, ‘patients’, ‘residents’, ‘consumers’, or something else altogether? Again, this is a touchpoint people have with your brand so think carefully about how you want your people referring to your customers.
Likewise, how do you talk about your employees? Are they ‘team members’ or ‘our people’, for example? At Disney, they use the term ‘Cast Member’ for their employees, which is very strongly linked to their brand.
Top tip - the word ‘staff’ is now considered outdated, as it has hierarchical connotations and isn’t very personable.
3 How you speak about what your business does
What does your company do? What services or products does it provide, and how do you describe them? For example, a banking company could refer to their products as ‘financial services’. A daycare service could say they offer ‘early learning’, ‘early childhood education’, or ‘childcare’. How you speak about your services and products is a strong signal of your brand essence.
4 How you ensure inclusive language
A writing style guide should provide direction to your people on how to ensure your communication is inclusive. Draw on official sources to provide direction on how to ensure language is inclusive and respectful of people with disabilities, neurodiverse people, people with mental health conditions, First Nations’ Australians, the LGBTQI+ community, and people facing vulnerability and disadvantage. Here’s some great resources to get started:
5 Other style elements
There are clear black-and-white rules about grammar; but in other instances it’s up to each organisaton to make decisions about their writing style. Here’s a quick list of other style elements to consider:
Heading styles
Role titles
Abbreviations and acronyms
Dates and time
Need help writing your company’s style guide? Get in touch!
