An editorial style guide helps you tame the chaos of English – making it easier for writers to stay consistent, saving time on edits, and keeping readers engaged.
English may be flexible and forgiving, but without clear rules even the most skilled writers can get tripped up by its quirks. An editorial style guide provides the structure you need to avoid missteps and make sure your organisation’s writing is correct, consistent, and credible.
Why we need to tame the English language
English is an ill-disciplined language. Wild, even. Some languages have official rule books. The Académie française, for example. Founded in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu, the Académie acts as an official authority on the French language, telling writers how they should spell words and what they should mean by them. Its founding mission was to impose “purity and discipline in language”. This includes banning (or resisting) foreign (English) words such as scoop, cool and hashtag, if you please.
All languages borrow, of course. But English probably more than most. To take a few random everyday words that I happen to have read recently: bazaar, robot, tattoo, bungalow, vaccine, and marmalade. These words come from Persian, Czech, Polynesian, Hindi, Latin, and Portuguese respectively. We even have splendid mixed-origin words like tarmacadam, which is a mishmash of ancient Germanic, Gaelic and Hebrew. English is an inclusive language all right. But I digress.
The nearest thing we have in English to an official language authority is probably the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). The OED’s mission is to be a definitive historical record of the English language by recording the origin and development of words. You see: it’s a different approach. The English dictionary is descriptive, not prescriptive. Our language authority doesn’t presume to impose “purity and discipline” on us. Like Humpty Dumpty, we’re free to use words to mean just what we choose them to mean.
Like Humpty Dumpty, we’re free to use words to mean just what we choose them to mean.
Photo credit: nikles5 / Pixabay
I like having an anarchic language. But there is a downside. Namely, that we English have ended up with more than our fair share of polysemes, homonyms, homophones, homographs, synonyms, heterographs, and goodness-knows-what.
In other words, English has lots of words with the same meaning and lots of meanings with the same word. And words with two or more acceptable spellings that have the same meaning (like adviser/advisor or acknowledgement/acknowledgment). And words with two or three possible plurals (like focuses/focusses/foci). And words with two spellings conveying different meanings (like role/roll or flak/flack or discreet/discrete). And couplets of words that can mean exactly the same thing but can also be used to convey different shades of meaning when spelled differently (like enquiry/inquiry or judgement/judgment).
Not to mention words that are commonly misused or don’t really exist in any mainstream sense but you see them in print (or on screen) anyway (like toothcomb, unchartered, shoe-in, and in hoc). And then there are pairs of words that ought to, or used to, have different meanings but get jumbled together in common usage (like imply/infer or appraise/apprise or perspicuous/perspicacious).
English is both easy for beginners and difficult for advanced learners.
Anomalies of this kind exist in all languages, as far as I know. But probably rather more in English than in other languages. That’s why English has been described as being both easy for beginners and difficult for advanced learners.
We don’t have a language authority to impose purity and discipline on us. But if our writing becomes too impure and undisciplined, readers will come to doubt our competence, and we might even look foolish. That’s why every organisation would do well to follow an established third-party style guide or, better still, compile its own.
Especially if it’s an organisation that has multiple content authors who may be subject-matter experts with their own individual ways of writing. And particularly where there are writers using English as a second language.
What is an editorial style guide?
It’s a set of rules and guidelines on how you write about your organisation, writing style, spelling, grammar and syntax, capitalisation and punctuation, sector-specific words and phrases, and more. It helps writers to achieve a high level of correctness and consistency.
A style guide is concerned with the nuts and bolts of:
- which language version to use, e.g. UK or US English;
- which spelling to opt for when it’s a word that has two correct spellings;
- which words to capitalise;
- which punctuation marks to use and when to use them;
- how to write numbers, dates, times and places consistently;
- how to make sure you don’t misuse or misspell the kinds of words that tend to get misused or misspelled;
- what’s the best way to punctuate a bulleted list like this one (a perennial puzzle)…
… and it provides rules and guidance on terminology specific to your organisation and sector.
A comprehensive style guide will also address voice and tone. While brand voice is a broad topic that can stand alone, it can also be included alongside the rules for grammar, spelling, and other writing conventions in the same document or set of documents.
What does an editorial style guide look like?
I was hoping you’d ask. It so happens that I’ve compiled a general-purpose style guide – for my clients, for myself, and for you if you find it useful. Feel free to use bits of it or all of it. Feel free to copy it. It’s not an original piece of work to which I claim copyright. Glossaries and usage guides aren’t supposed to be original; they’re supposed to bring consistency. I acknowledge my sources.
I hope this one-size-fits-most guide is useful to you. However, if yours is a big organisation with many content authors, a great deal of specialist vocabulary, and/or a need to take extreme care with the words you use, you might need a style guide tailored to your needs. Please get in touch.