The Power of We: Why 2020 is the Year You Should Finally Create Your Own Style Guide

Guest Post by J. S. Burton, who can be found at

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeana-s-burton-aaa1222b or https://jsburtonwriterandeditor.wordpress.com/

It's a new year. If you're like many entrepreneurs, business owners, or other managers of content, you might have made a resolution to finally choose or create a style guide.

The good news is that this resolution doesn't involve trying to find a parking space at a gym in January. The bad news is that you've still got some work to do.

The First Bit of Work

The first bit of work is to figure out just what you mean when you say to yourself, "I've really got to choose or create a style guide."

Do you mean that you want a style guide? Or are you thinking more broadly of a brand guide?

A brand guide describes your brand’s history, vision, personality, and other key elements including how and when to use the logo, and what color palettes and fonts are approved or forbidden.

If you have a brand, you absolutely need a brand guide. You can find some great advice on how to create your own brand guides here.

And most brands could also benefit from a style guide. You might think of a style guide as that part of your brand guide that describes your brand's voice in detail. (Sometimes excruciating detail. But that can be good, if that's the kind of meticulous personality that you want to come through in the voice of your brand.)

The Second Bit of Work

The second bit of work is to decide whether to use an existing style guide or to create your own.

You could simply choose an existing general style guide or one that is specifically geared to your field to give voice to your business. Here are a few examples of those types of style guides ranging from more general to more specific:

  • The Chicago Manual of Style

  • The Wall Street Journal Guide to Business Style and Usage

  • Microsoft Writing Style Guide

  • Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA)

  • Association of Legal Writing Directors Citation Manual, Association of Legal Writing Directors (ALWD)

You might reasonably assume that a style guide, like any one of those above, which was created to represent the collective voice of an industry or field is a guide that you can take up with complete confidence as a member of said industry or field. But should you be that confident about it? Let’s explore…

The Benefits and Risks of Using an Existing Style Guide

Benefits

Using an existing style guide could:

  • Save you time.

  • Save you effort.

  • Save you the risk of sounding unprofessional, untraditional, or amateurish.

Risks

But using an existing style guide also comes with some risks:

  • You might sound like every other professional, traditional - boring - person or business in your field.

  • Or worse yet, you might not use that style guide at all because it's too overwhelming to learn and because you have no personal attachment to any of its individual rules, therefore wasting 100% of the time and effort that you took to choose it in the first place AND continuing on creating content riddled with inconsistencies.

What if you created your own style guide, instead?

Why You Should Consider Creating Your Own Style Guide

Wait, you might ask, why would I take the extra time and make the extra effort to create my own style guide? It sounds like a lot of work.

Maybe. But trust me, it’s worth it. And it’s probably a lot less work than you’re imagining.

Many organizations skip some of the hard work of creating a style guide by building on the foundation of an existing style guide.

And you could do what they do:

1.      Choose a few relevant guidelines or hard and fast rules from an existing style guide - not so many that your team despairs of ever learning them all - and then call these chosen few guidelines/rules your own style guide.

2.      To this bespoke guide, you and your team can, over time, add new guidelines and rules that emerge out of specific work contexts and discussions.

Some Important Benefits of Creating Your Own Style Guide

What are the benefits of creating your own style guide like this? Many! But here are three of the most important ones:

  • A manageable style guide that anyone on your team can learn and use.

  • More consistent content.

  • Less time wasted about arguing over whether to use the Oxford comma or not. (Use it!)

But you might be surprised to find that the number one benefit of creating your own style guide is the "power of we."

The Number One Benefit of Creating Your Own Style Guide? The Power of We!

I like what Robert Cialdini has to say in Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion about the almost magical way that we can build consensus by first persuading a handful of people to make only one small commitment, such as meeting to establish a few style guidelines that will shape the voice of the brand.

For good or ill, Cialdini says, we judge people, including ourselves, by our actions. And we don't need a very large sample size of actions in order to make a significant judgment about a person, including ourselves. Therefore, if we take even a single action in the service of one small commitment, it can begin to reshape the kind of person we believe ourselves to be.

What does this mean for you and your style guide? If you can persuade even a tiny team of people - three people is a team! - to create a style guide for your organization, you are not only creating a style guide you are building a small tribe of people who are *the kind of people* who care about style.

This Is How We Do It!

Once you've built your tribe of people who care about how we do style, that tribe can influence other members of your org's culture to be the kind of people who also care.

The more your particular style becomes part of your internal culture, the more that style gets translated through advertising, marketing, word of mouth referrals, and so on to make your brand an instantly recognizable part of the external world.

But, you might ask, what if I'm just a team of one? Even if you're a true solo-preneur, you can still harness the "power of we" to keep yourself focused on creating content that represents the voice of your brand. Just because there's only one of you doesn't mean that you can't be unforgettably stylish.

Photo credit: Valerie Elash, Unsplash