| name | style-guide |
| description | Create and maintain an editorial style guide covering voice, tone, mechanics, terminology, numbers, capitalization, citations, inclusivity, product names, and exceptions so distributed writers can make consistent decisions. |
Editorial Style Guide
Use when multiple writers or channels need durable writing conventions beyond one document.
Procedure
- Define the audiences, publication types, brand or editorial voice, and recurring decisions that currently produce inconsistency.
- Separate voice principles from mechanical rules such as punctuation, capitalization, dates, numbers, units, headings, links, and citations.
- Establish preferred product, company, technical, and domain terminology plus deprecated or confusing alternatives.
- Define tone variation by context such as documentation, support, marketing, incident communication, executive writing, or community content where needed.
- Include inclusive-language and accessibility guidance that improves comprehension without turning the guide into an exhaustive language manual.
- Provide concise examples for rules that are easily misread and document intentional exceptions.
- Align with upstream language or citation standards where the organization has adopted them rather than reinventing every convention.
- Review the guide against real editorial disputes and remove rules that no longer help writers make decisions.
Decision rules
- A style guide should resolve recurring ambiguity, not codify every editor preference.
- Voice can adapt by context while remaining recognizable.
- Product terminology should match current product truth.
- Examples clarify rules but should not become copy templates.
Quality gate
The guide is useful when independent writers make consistent high-frequency decisions, terminology and mechanics are clear, context-specific tone remains flexible, exceptions are explicit, and the document is concise enough that contributors actually use it.
