An editorial style guide answers questions such as these: Is it startup or start-up? Our business’s priority or our business’ priority? Three percent, 3 percent, or 3%? How about the comma before or in the previous sentence? Do we need to use the trademark (™) and copyright (©) symbols in business reports? And is it correct to start sentences with and? Do contractions (like haven’t instead of have not) make us sound informal?
These are the sorts of editorial style decisions you’ll need to make when creating reports, website content, and other forms of written business communications. Consulting a dictionary or reference book isn’t practical, because style questions don’t have just one right answer and you may waste a lot of time trying to decide what works for you. That’s why you need standards—an editorial style guide—and perhaps a freelance editor, too.
What’s an editorial style guide for a small business?
An editorial style guide is a set of conventions for an organization’s written communications. This document includes guidelines on grammar, spelling, punctuation, and usage, but can also touch on voice and tone, structure and format, and other writing-related topics.
Also called writing, content, publications, or communications style guide, or editorial style standards, the editorial style guide is part of an organization’s brand identity manual.
By following the guidelines in your editorial style guide, you save time when preparing written materials while ensuring your organization is perceived as professional and credible.
Creating an editorial style guide for a business
You don’t need to draft your organization’s style guide from scratch. Editors and other language experts have already put together comprehensive style books such as The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) and The Associated Press (AP) Stylebook. These are two of the most commonly used style manuals today for media and business communications.
These manuals cover more style issues than you’ll ever need—or want—to know. However, they may not cover issues that are specific to your organization, such as the most common troublesome terms for your team. So, choose your preferred manual and use it as a base for developing your own set of editorial style guidelines.
How long is an editorial style guide for a business?
Your organization’s editorial style guide needs to be a quick reference tool for you and your team. This document can be as detailed as you need it to be. As a rule of thumb, an in-house editorial style guide should be just a few pages long. For any issues not covered in your guide, you can always refer to your preferred style book (such as CMOS or AP).
Also, the best editorial style guides are living documents. So, update your guide regularly to ensure it covers the most common issues in your business’s communications.
Editorial style guide examples
Newspapers and other media outlets, universities, governmental organizations, and the European Commission have style guides, and most of them are available online. Businesses of any size have editorial style guides as well, even if they aren’t publicly available. In general, any organization whose written communications look consistent and professional is most likely using an in-house editorial style guide.
The following is a list of guides freely available online that you can draw inspiration from. Many of them contain conventions as well as grammatical rules, so use discernment when deciding what to include in your business’s style guide.
- University of Colorado Boulder: Based on the AP Stylebook, this style guide is concise and easy to read.
- The Writer: This witty style guide demonstrates that standards don’t need to be boring. The Writer.com guidelines are especially useful for anyone writing for the web.
- University of Oxford: Although many sections of this guide are too specific to Oxford University to be useful for your organization, the sections on numbers, punctuation, and word usage and spelling can become part of any style guide.
- The Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy: This style guide has good coverage of web writing best practices.
- European Commission: The EU Commission style guide is useful if you work with EU projects.
What should an editorial style guide include?
When you use this editorial style guide template to create your company’s style guide, you—or your freelance editor—may need to delete or add sections so that your guide meets the needs of your business. Remember to include examples to make guidelines easier to understand and follow.
Free editorial style guide template
Introduction
This section explains what this editorial style guide is, why we use it, and how we treat issues not included here.
What are editorial guidelines?
This document provides guidelines on grammar, spelling, usage, and punctuation for all written materials we produce. This document is not meant to replace grammar books or dictionaries—think of it as a cheat sheet.
Why is an editorial style guide important?
This quick reference guide is meant to help us save time and effort, and create clear and consistent documents that reflect our brand.
How do we treat issues not included in this style guide?
For issues not covered here, refer to The Chicago Manual of Style, The Merriam-Webster dictionary, and Garner’s Modern English Usage.
Tone and voice
Defining the tone and voice of our business is important to ensure all our communications are consistent and reflect our brand.
Tone
Tone is how our communications sound. We adapt our business’s tone to match our audience (clients, suppliers, the public, and so on).
The tone of our business reports is objective, distant, serious, and logical. The tone of our blog posts and marketing materials is subjective and friendly. It is never superficial or sarcastic.
Voice
The voice of our business stays the same no matter what we write. Our business’s voice is honest, trustworthy, and professional.
Editorial style preferences
- In general, write in the active voice. But you may use passive voice when needed.
- Avoid very long or complicated sentences.
- Use a mix of short and long sentences to avoid sounding robotic or tedious.
- Keep paragraphs short.
- Be concise and clear.
- Give examples.
- Don’t use a thesaurus; use common words.
- Use they as a unisex pronoun instead of he/she or he or she, or use the plural.
- Yes: A project manager is hired only if they have good people skills.
- Better: Project managers are hired only if they have good people skills.
What to never include
- Racist, defamatory, or sexist language
- References to sex, alcohol, drugs, politics, religion
- Jargon
- Clichés
- Slang
- Facts you didn’t fact-check or assumptions
OK to use sparingly
- Metaphors and other figures of speech
- Special terminology (jargon)
Formatting
- Sentence-style (not headline-style) capitalization for headings and subheadings
- This is sentence-style capitalization
- This Is Headline-style Capitalization
- Italics for book titles and movies
- Italics, not bold, for emphasis
- Underline hyperlinks
- Curly quotation marks (“a” or ‘a’) and apostrophes (a day’s work) instead of straight quotation marks and apostrophes
Punctuation
- Double quotes, not single quotes (“a”, not ‘a’)
- Punctuation in relation to quotation marks: British (or logical style), not American
- Oxford comma (comma before the last item in a series)
- Avoid and/or
- Only one space between sentences
Lists
- Use a bullet list when the order of the items doesn’t matter.
- Use a numbered list when the items on a list are sequential.
- Use a colon before a vertical list only if what comes before the list is a complete sentence.
Dashes and hyphens
- Em dash (—) to mark an abrupt change in thought, or for emphasis or explanation
- Insert an em dash in Windows: ALT + CTRL + number pad minus, or ALT + 0151
- En dash (–) to separate dates and numbers (items 3–10, not items 3 – 10)
- Insert an en dash in Windows: CTRL + number pad minus, or ALT+0150
- Hyphen (-) to form compound words
- modern-day trend, not modern day trend
- highly skilled person, not highly-skilled person (first word ends in -ly)
Contractions
No contractions (shouldn’t, can’t, don’t) in formal documents
Symbols
- No copyright (©), trademark (™), or registered mark (®) symbols in text
- Ampersand (&) only in company names, tables, and figures—never in text or headings
- Other symbols only if needed (@ in email addresses is OK, # for tweets is OK)
Capitalization
- Capitalize proper nouns.
- Never capitalize a term to emphasize it. Use italics for emphasis.
- Capitalize official department names (Marketing Department; the department of marketing).
- Names of companies or brands (LinkedIn, not Linkedin; iPhone, not Iphone; eBay, not Ebay)
Acronyms
Spell out an acronym the first time it is used in a document, or in a chapter if it’s a long document, and then use the acronym.
Abbreviations
- Except in reports and white papers, avoid Latin abbreviations (etc., i.e., e.g., et al.).
- etc. = and so on
- i.e. = that is
- e.g. = for example
- et al. = and others
- Use abbreviations only in tables, images, and captions.
- Use a comma after e.g., i.e., and et al.
Units of measurement
- SI units
- Spell out units of measurement in text; use abbreviations (g, m, cm, km/s) in tables or figures.
Numbers
- Numbers one through nine are spelled out. Numbers 10 and above are expressed as figures. Exception: When starting a sentence with a number, always spell it out, unless it’s a year.
- Ten months ago we started the project.
- 1991 was a good year for our business.
- Use figures when writing percentages, ages, and measurements.
- 3 per cent, not three per cent
- 5-year-old dog, not five-year-old dog
- 2 seconds, not two seconds
- Avoid suffixes (st, nd, and th) in ordinal numerals.
- twelfth, not 12th
- twenty-first century, not 21st century
Decimals
- Use a dot to separate decimals (9.01, not 9,01).
- Always use a zero before the decimal point (0.05, not .05).
Telephone numbers
- Country code starts with 00, not +
- Preferred format: country code-111-222-0000
Currency
- In text: 70 euros, 80 dollars
- In images and tables: €50, US$50, A$50, Can$50, NZ$50
Dates
- Day/month/year: 27/11/2016
- In-text reference: 27 November 2016
Times
Use the 12-hour clock
- 5 p.m. (not P.M. or PM)
- 8 a.m. (not A.M. or AM)
Grammar
Plurals
- A’s and B’s, but CDs, not CD’s
- cul-de-sac – culs-de-sac
- criterion – criteria
- dos and don’ts
- medium – media
- whys and hows
Possessives
- business’s purpose, but business’ story (the second word starts with an s)
- Kansas’s team, Athens’s population
- 10 years’ experience
- two weeks’ notice
- others’ programs
- another’s letter
Parallel structures
- Yes: We like developing innovative products, strengthening our brand, and keeping our customers happy.
- No: We like developing innovative products, strengthening our brand, and to keep our customers happy.
Modifiers
- No: Having developed a schedule, it is now ready for the client.
- Yes: Having developed a schedule, we are ready to present it to the client.
- Yes: The schedule we developed is ready for the client.
Spelling
For words not listed here, refer to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary. If it lists more than one spelling for a word, use the first entry.
Troublesome words
- affect vs. effect
- back up (verb) vs. backup (noun, adjective)
- complementary vs. complimentary
- e-book, not eBook or ebook
- email, not e-mail
- homepage, not home page
- input
- internet, not Internet
- log in (verb), login (noun or adjective)
- startup (noun), start up (verb)
- smartphone, not smart phone
- real-time (adjective), vs. real time (noun)
- running a Google search, running a web search, not googling or Googling
- set up (verb) vs. setup (noun, adjective)
- touchscreen, not touch screen
- user name, not username
- website, but web page
- Wi-Fi, not WiFi or wifi
Foreign terms
- Use diacritics (cliché, not cliche).
- If the foreign word is uncommon, add the English translation in parentheses.
Updates to this editorial style guide
This guide is a living document. It will be revised periodically to ensure it covers the most common issues we encounter when creating written business communications. If you want to suggest other topics to be included here, contact our freelance editor at [insert email here].
Do you need help creating a style guide or editing your business communications? Send me a message at editor@languageediting.com.
Related posts:
- The small-business owner’s proofreading checklist
- Tips from an editor on managing content writing projects
- Number formatting in Europe vs. the US
Last revised on 17 June 2022
