Style guides are essential for businesses, providing clear writing guidelines for consistency and clarity across internal and external communications. By outlining preferences for things like capitalisation, formatting, punctuation and tone of voice, style guides help writers and editors create consistent content, streamline the content creation process by removing guesswork and strengthen brand identity.
At Editor Group, we call on style guides for almost every job and have been pleased to create them for numerous private and government organisations.
However, we’ve also found that organisations can take a ‘set and forget’ approach to style guides – creating them in a burst of enthusiasm, sharing them with teams and then largely ignoring or forgetting about them. This significantly limits the true value of a style guide: keeping communication consistent and aligned as organisations change and grow.
That’s why we believe that style guides should be ‘living’ documents that evolve with your organisation and continue to reflect its strategy and complexity, and the world around it.
Supporting clarity as priorities and usage shifts
Organisations should do three key things with their living style guides: embed them in everyday writing practice, update them regularly to reflect changing language conventions and ensure they evolve in step with an organisation’s culture, values and purpose.
- Make style guides an everyday writing tool
A good style guide helps writers make consistent, reader-focused decisions about how they communicate. It sets clear expectations for how information should be presented, how much detail is appropriate, and how language should be used across different audiences and channels.
This includes defining:
- knowledge that can be assumed and what should always be explained
- terms and phrases to avoid, and when plain language should be used instead
- the level of detail appropriate for different audiences, formats and channels
- preferred terminology to ensure consistency across teams and markets.
When style guides are part of everyday writing practice, not only do team members produce clearer, more consistent content, but editing and approvals become much easier and quicker.
Instead of debating personal preferences, teams can align around agreed principles: who the audience is, what they need and how the organisation has chosen to speak to them. This means no more unnecessary arguments over the correct way to format and punctuate a list.
- Update them regularly to reflect changes in spelling, grammar and language conventions
Language is a living thing shaped by culture, technology and the way people communicate. Words fall in and out of use, spellings change, new terms appear (think ‘AI slop’ and ‘rage bait’), meanings shift and new language conventions emerge. This ongoing evolution means that written communication must remain adaptable, reflecting not only current language trends but also readers’ preferences.
For instance, while the convention for numbers used to be to spell out numbers less than 10 in words, many organisations now prefer to use numerals for all numbers except zero and one, as it makes content shorter and more accessible. The popularity of this style prompted the widely used Australian Government Style Manual to revise its advice on the subject in its sixth edition.
The use of AI is also influencing style preferences. This is most clearly seen in the backlash against the ‘em’ dash – a punctuation mark that signifies a pause and is often used in place of colons, commas or parentheses in US English. Many people think it is a sign that a piece of text has been written by AI, which has led to its declining popularity. However, many writers still like using it.
In addition to shifting stylistic preferences, accessibility requirements are also driving changes in language conventions. As accessibility standards, such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, continue to develop and new assistive technologies emerge, organisations need to regularly update their style guides to ensure content remains usable for individuals with diverse abilities. This ongoing maintenance is not only best practice but also essential for government agencies to demonstrate compliance with regulatory requirements.
- Evolve with organisational priorities
In addition to promoting clarity and consistency, living style guides serve another purpose: helping organisations make considered choices.
Clear, effective writing isn’t about showcasing everything an organisation knows; it is about making deliberate choices so readers can quickly understand what matters to them. Living style guides exist to support those choices, especially as organisations shift priorities, evolve their brand or launch new products or services.
This is why many of the global organisations we work with provide us with updated style guidance – such as slide decks, templates and supporting assets – alongside their long-standing core style guide when launching new branding initiatives or marketing campaigns. Government agencies may also provide updated lists of current terminology.
Ensuring your style guide remains relevant
Ultimately, the purpose of a style guide is not to constrain writers. It exists to remove unnecessary complexity, avoid endless debate and stop teams from having to reinvent the wheel every time they write. By helping teams to make confident, consistent writing decisions, a style guide makes space for what matters most: clear, effective communication that works for its readers.
But a style guide that doesn’t adapt as your organisation does will quickly lose relevance. To deliver lasting value, it must be a living document that is used, reviewed and updated as your organisation’s needs change. If this is something you’d like to discuss on behalf of your organisation, please get in touch.
Ylla Watkins
