Introduction

This project aims to be a cookie cutter for a basic style guide. The pages within it contain some questions that you can work through with a client, or on your own, to define a set of rules. You can delete the sections that you are ambivalent about or find irrelevant. You can take it, edit it, and make your guide, which as short (or as long) as you find comfortable.

Note that this is NOT a style guide in itself. It doesn't set out any rules but leads you into making decisions about your own guidelines. There is a page of reference guides and resources to improve your writing, but ultimately, this is not the place to find judgement on any choice of rules! (Although I personally hate the Oxford comma).

The guide is currently available and focussed on writers using English (whichever flavour/flavor). I would welcome contributions from those wanting to build guides in other languages. I'm aware that non-native English speakers have to write in English, and don't always appreciate arcane rules about comma placement, prepositions or pronouns. To that end, guidelines about highly-specific and unusual nuances of the English language should be considered secondary.

Background (or why you may need a style cutter)

When you first start working on a piece, or with a new client, you ask all kinds of questions:

• Who is the audience?

  • What level do I need to write to (beginner -> advanced in this topic))?

• What problem are you trying to solve for the reader?

• What kind of piece am I writing? (informal blog post -> formal journal article)?

• How long should this piece be?

• How long do I have to write it?

• How much am I getting paid (if anything)?

There are sure to be many other questions too. One of them is the tone of voice, or the style, of your writing. Do you need to follow a particular guide? Is there a set of "rules"?

While larger organisations may have style guides and rules to how you set out your words, others do not. Sometimes, those without a guide will ask you to suggest some basic rules for the future.

Even if you write for yourself, you may want to have some consistency in your style, so when you look through your draft, you can tweak them to be consistent with past and future writing. (Sometimes, you need a record of whether you've capitalised the start of your bullet points and added punctuation to the end of them). Sometimes style is to be inconsistent.