create-a-content-style-guide

name	create-a-content-style-guide
category	write
description	Create concise, testable writing rules from audience needs, brand decisions, and recurring content examples. Use when multiple people or agents need consistent editorial choices.

create-a-content-style-guide

Record decisions writers repeatedly need. Prefer examples and decision rules over abstract brand adjectives.

Procedure

1. Define audiences, channels, content types, languages, owners, and the inconsistency or risk the guide must reduce.
2. Audit representative published content, support issues, search behavior, legal requirements, and accessibility needs.
3. Identify recurring decisions about voice, tone, structure, terminology, grammar, numbers, dates, links, calls to action, and inclusive language.
4. Separate organization-specific rules from the external base style the team adopts.
5. Write each rule with rationale, preferred example, avoid example, and exception where needed.
6. Add channel and situation guidance for errors, urgency, sensitive topics, translation, and regulated claims.
7. Create an approved terminology list with definitions, capitalization, deprecated terms, and owner.
8. Test the guide on real editing tasks with multiple users and record disagreements or missing rules.
9. Revise for findability, assign governance, and set a version, feedback path, and review trigger.

Failure plan

• Do not encode stereotypes, exclusion, manipulative patterns, or unsupported marketing claims as voice.
• Never copy another organization's proprietary guide without permission.
• If a rule conflicts with law, accessibility, accuracy, or user safety, those constraints win.
• Avoid rules that cannot be distinguished in real examples.

Done

• Core rules, terminology, examples, exceptions, and owners are written
• Multiple users apply the guide to representative content with consistent results
• Version, review trigger, feedback route, and superseded guidance are recorded