Style guides
Keep your content consistent with a set of guidelines.
What is a style guide?
A style guide is a set of rules that dictate how you write. This includes grammar, punctuation, slang, tone, and more. It’s usually used internally, but it’s also useful to send to external writers who write for your brand.
Why you need a brand style guide
Just like with brand voice, the way you talk to your users matters — for more reasons than one.
Consistency
Ensure that everyone who writes for your brand knows how to. How do you capitalize your products’ names? When you post on Instagram, do you use emojis? When you write a date, does the day go first, or the month?
Protection
Maintain consumer trust with consistent writing. Imagine one of your users receives an email that just doesn’t sound like you. They might think it’s a scam, even if it’s real — and that’s a very bad look for your brand.
Efficiency
Don’t let writers waste time figuring out how to write something. And you, as the stakeholder, definitely shouldn’t waste time correcting those mistakes. Answer all the questions today so that they don’t get asked tomorrow.
Brand style guide vs. content style guide
These terms may be used differently depending on who you’re talking to, but here’s how we break down the terminology.
Brand style guide
This defines your brand’s identity, from its typography to its color palette. A content style guide is included here (or it should be!).
Content style guide
This defines your brand’s editorial identity. In other words, how you speak, your word choices, and even how those words are formatted. Remember when you’d have to write an essay for school? Your teacher may have asked you to write your full name in the upper lefthand corner. This is an example of content style.
Our style guide guide
Yeah, that doesn’t sound great — and actually, that’s not our style! At The Pear, we avoid repeating words, even if it’s grammatically correct. That’s just a small example of something that might be outlined in your style guide.
The first thing we do is take our template and adapt it to your existing brand. We’ll fill in all the details so you don’t have to (we hate wasting time!), and then we’ll review all the style decisions so you’re on board with the guidelines.
What we include in style guides
Basically....everything. We don’t want to waste time asking, “Wait, did we decide how we write dates?” We have a base style guide in which we pull in a reference style manual (such as Associated Press, or AP) and dictionary, which we adapt for clients.
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Grammar
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Punctuation
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Brand voice
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Tone of voice
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Numbers and units of measure
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Addresses
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Date and time formats
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Charts and tables
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List structure
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Headlines
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Footnotes and references
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Quotations
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Names
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Regional English (e.g., American or British)
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Glossary
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Prohibited topics
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Legal statements
Once we’ve gotten the guide to the finish line, there’s still one more very important step: rolling it out. We like to hold workshops to explain what’s inside the guide and how to use it.