Style guide
The written rules for how your brand sounds and formats things, so every writer and every model produces work that reads like you.
In depth
What it really means
A style guide records how your brand writes: voice, tone by context, vocabulary you use and avoid, formatting conventions, and the mechanical rules that otherwise get argued about weekly. It exists so consistency does not depend on one person reading every draft.
Its value changed in the last two years. A style guide used to be an onboarding document for freelancers. It is now the instruction set you hand a model, and the single most effective defence against everything you publish drifting toward the same fluent, characterless register.
What actually belongs in it
| Section | The version that works |
|---|---|
| Voice | Three adjectives, each with a do and a do-not example from your own published work |
| Tone by context | How the blog differs from the pricing page, docs and error messages |
| Banned words | An explicit list. This is the highest-value page in the document. |
| Structural rules | Heading style, paragraph length, list use, how tables are formatted |
| Mechanics | Oxford comma, capitalization, numbers, dates, punctuation you never use |
| Product language | Feature names, capitalization, what things are never called |
| Examples | Two real published pieces marked up with what works and why |
Give the guide plus a topic to a writer who has never worked with you. If the draft comes back needing voice edits rather than substance edits, the guide has failed.
Most style guides fail this because they describe voice in adjectives nobody can act on. “Friendly but professional” is true of almost every B2B brand and instructs nobody. “We write in second person, never use exclamation marks, and never open with a question” is a rule someone can follow.
Pros & cons
Pros
- Removes an entire category of editing, which shows up directly in cycle time.
- Makes freelancers and models usable without close supervision.
- Consistency across touchpoints is a trust signal, including in the small places like email signatures.
- Settles recurring arguments once instead of monthly.
Cons
- Goes stale, and an outdated guide is followed until someone notices.
- Over-prescription flattens good writers into house style.
- Nobody reads a 40-page guide. Length is the main failure mode.
- Needs an owner, or it becomes a document everyone cites and nobody updates.
The mistake people make
Writing the aspirational voice rather than the actual one. Teams describe how they wish they sounded, publish the guide, and then every draft written to it feels off because it does not match anything already on the site. Build the guide by marking up your five best-performing published pieces and extracting the patterns already there. Then decide what to change deliberately.
Best practices
- Derive it from published work you are proud of, rather than from aspiration.
- Keep it under five pages. A guide nobody finishes helps nobody.
- Include a banned-words list. It is the section people actually use.
- Give a do and a do-not example for every rule.
- Extend it to every touchpoint, including sales emails and email signatures, where inconsistency is most visible.
- Review annually, and immediately after any repositioning.
FAQs
What is a style guide?
The written rules for how your brand sounds and formats content, so consistency does not depend on one reviewer.
How long should it be?
Under five pages. Longer guides get skimmed and then ignored.
Do we need one if we have one writer?
Yes, for the day you have two, and for the models that writer is already using.
What is the most useful section?
The banned-words list, followed by marked-up examples of your own published work.
How does it help with AI drafts?
It becomes the instruction set. A specific guide is the main thing separating a usable generated draft from AI slop.
Keep reading
Related on LymLyt
Beyond LymLyt
Further reading
Want this working on your site?
We build the content behind the term, ranked in search and cited by AI.
Book a 30-min call →