style-guide

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

1. Define the audiences, publication types, brand or editorial voice, and recurring decisions that currently produce inconsistency.
2. Separate voice principles from mechanical rules such as punctuation, capitalization, dates, numbers, units, headings, links, and citations.
3. Establish preferred product, company, technical, and domain terminology plus deprecated or confusing alternatives.
4. Define tone variation by context such as documentation, support, marketing, incident communication, executive writing, or community content where needed.
5. Include inclusive-language and accessibility guidance that improves comprehension without turning the guide into an exhaustive language manual.
6. Provide concise examples for rules that are easily misread and document intentional exceptions.
7. Align with upstream language or citation standards where the organization has adopted them rather than reinventing every convention.
8. 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.