Monday 22 February 2021

The Importance of Style Part 2: What to include in a style guide?

My last post covered why style is important and how a style guide can help ensure your style is more consistent and therefore more effective. But what should a style guide include? Keep reading to find out.

Most style guides start at the macro level and then go into greater detail. The macro level should cover your organization’s purpose, audience, common document types and whether different conventions apply to them. It is also important to include a detailed description of your brand personality and voice. While you might decide to go into more or less detail on the other points mentioned, having a consistent brand voice is essential. Fiona Gray of Grayscale Translations has kindly agreed to write a guest post on this topic, which will be released next month.

Photo of hands typing by Christina Morillo

Other macro level language issues include:

i) how to write for your audience, i.e. what register to use (formal v. informal) and what level of subject area knowledge they can be expected to have.

ii) how to use gender-neutral language. There are several ways to deal with this and the OECD and EU style guides go into detail on this topic. You should, for example, use police officer rather than police man and chair or chairperson rather than chairman when you don’t know the individual’s gender. But will you use they to talk about a person of unknown gender? Will you use the plural? Will you rephrase the sentence to avoid pronouns altogether?

iii) how to write in plain English. Plain English is a topic in itself and has been written about extensively. To ensure you get your message across effectively, you should be using plain English. Plain English tends to use verbs rather than nouns, to prefer active rather than passive sentences and to avoid excessively long sentences and jargon.

iv) your preferred terminology. The words you use have an impact in the real world, particularly on how people interpret a given situation or your intentions. It’s often best to avoid terms that (re)victimize people in a humanitarian context, so use survivor rather than victim and experience rather than suffer. It is especially important to make your terminology preferences clear where terms are contentious or have cultural, legal or political significance.


Moving on to the micro level, we come to grammar and style preferences. These are not, for better or worse, standardized in English so many organizations have their own style guides to ensure consistency.

The main points covered include spelling (British or American English), punctuation, capitalization and numbers/units.

The most common differences affect:

Lists. Do list items end in a full stop, comma, semicolon or nothing? Does it depend on the type of list?

Number formats. Is it 200,000,000, 200 000 000 or 2 million? Beware, many European countries use a full stop rather than a comma as the thousands separator (200.000) and a comma rather than a full stop to mark the decimal (0,89).

Units. Are they close up to the number or separated with a hard space (2m v 2 m).

Percentages. Everyone seems to do this differently. Is it 1%, 1 %, 1 percent or 1 per cent?

Hyphenation. Do you cooperate or co-operate?

Referencing. I can't even bring myself to explain how many referencing standards there are. Put simply, you just need to pick one.

These questions come up time and again. You might therefore find it useful to draw up a quick reference style sheet. Danielle N Carter’s blog post on style sheets is an excellent introduction to this topic.

When it comes to style guides for grammar and punctuation, you could choose to follow easily accessible style guides published by international organizations. These have the benefit of being preloaded into proofing tools like PerfectIt.

When deciding which example to use think about your audience. If your audience is based primarily in Europe, you might want to follow the EU’s guidance. If it’s based in the USA, the Chicago Manual of Style is popular. If your audience is decidedly international, the United Nations Editorial Manual might be best.

 

Working with translators

If you’re going to have your documents translated, it is helpful to cover a few translation related points.

How will you deal with foreign organization names? Will you keep the original name and translate it in brackets? Will you use the original acronym or one based on the translation? Does it depend on the type or prominence of the organization?

How will you deal with words that have no direct translation? There are arguments for and against italicizing foreign words and this could be a politically relevant point.

Do you want specific terms to be translated in a specific way to ensure everyone is on the same page from one document to the next? Here a glossary or term base might come in handy.

Drawing up a style guide from scratch is no mean feat. Your brand personality and voice will of course be unique to you, as will your terminology preferences. But for guidance on other stylistic issues, particularly at the micro level, I would recommend using an existing style guide, at least as a starting point.

Part three will cover precisely how to define and communicate your voice to your writers and translators.