How to Create a Corporate Style Guide?

In addition to the standard style guides, most of the companies have their own corporate style guides to cover
specific corporate issues. Corporate style guides can improve document quality by creating consistency within and among documents, promoting a professional image, training new employees, and defining document generation.

Some guidelines for developing a corporate style guide:

• What topics should NOT be in a style guide?

Though style guides can include a variety of topics, there are some topics which should go into a separate document. Process information (how things are done in the particular company) and design information (how the documents should look like) are topics which should not go into a style guide. Also, it should be remembered that style guides are reference tools and not training tools, and care should be taken not to turn a style guide into a tutorial on grammar, spelling, and punctuation. The style guide should include only as much information as is needed and the decision rationale need not be mentioned in a style guide.

• What topics should be in a style guide?

There is no "correct" or "incorrect" grammar or style, rather the decisions as to what should be included in a style guide are made by the employer or the client from among the many possibilities.

• How detailed should a style guide be?

A style guide can be as short as a single page or it can be quite lengthy. Many companies adopt a standard style guide and only additions or changes are noted in the company style guide. Other companies summarize the most relevant points from a major style guide in the company style guide. How detailed a company's style guide should be depends on how much the styles deviate from those of the recognized style guides, the types of information products the company delivers, and how many different elements those information products include.

• Do you need more than one style guide?

Some organizations may need only one style guide for both their hardcopy and online documents. Most of the rules of writing style will be the same for an organization. Sometimes hardcopy and online documents may have different requirements; service companies will have to address different clients who need different styles; sometimes different projects of the same company may address different audiences. These are instances when product-specific, publication-specific, or client-specific style guides will come in handy.