Style guides are key to developing and maintaining consistency in your publications. This is particularly important when more than one person is contributing content. I’m a fan of the Oxford comma (i.e., putting a comma after the last item before AND in a list of three or more) and I much prefer twenty-first to 21st when it comes to centuries. You might think the opposite. If we both write for the same website, then unless there’s a style guide that specifies what to do, the inconsistencies in our writing will mount up.

Whether you prefer to use American or British English, or the increasingly common hybrid – British English with -ize spelling – what’s important is that you, and everyone who writes for you, are consistent. Apart from unnecessary apostrophes (e.g. using it’s as a possessive or writing PhD’s as a plural), one of the most irritating features of poor-quality written English lies in the inconsistency.

Yes, some say that as long as the message is getting across, it doesn’t matter. But it does. It really does. Especially for multinational companies or international organisations that have multiple contributors.

Style guides are revision controlled and evolve over time to answer countless recurring questions, such as:

• Do I have to spell out EVERY abbreviation on first use or are there industry-specific terms that I can safely assume my audience will understand?
• Is it US or USA?
• When do I use an article in front of an abbreviation?
• How do I punctuate bulleted lists?
• Should I spell out all numbers or can I use figures?
• Do I capitalise a person’s job title?
• Do I use italics or bold or single quotation marks for emphasis?
• How do I treat quotations? And quotations within quotations? And longer quotations?

It’s best to start your style guide when you first start publishing material, either in-house or on your website. But I know that rarely, if ever, happens. Better late than never, though. If you’re not the only one writing for your website or your company or your organisation, you need one.

Let’s talk.