How does a style guide work?
- Pick a base, such as AP or Chicago style, and record only the exceptions and decisions specific to your company.
- List the decisions people argue about: sentence case or title case, serial comma, how to write times, currency and phone numbers.
- Add a word list: product names, trademarks, terms to avoid, and preferred spellings for each market you serve.
- Include formatting rules for headings, lists, links, alt text and email signatures.
- Assign an owner, version the document and review it twice a year.
A worked example
A B2B software company with offices in Toronto and Austin kept shipping documentation with mixed spellings, three ways of writing its own product name and dates that confused customers in both countries. A content assistant drafted a style guide in Notion: US spelling for the main site, Canadian spelling for the Canadian site, sentence case headings, the product name written one way, dates spelled out, and a 60-entry word list. She then ran a two-week cleanup of the help center against the guide. Support tickets asking what a term meant dropped, and new writers were productive from their first week.
Where does a style guide show up in your tools?
Style guides live in Notion, Confluence or Google Docs and are enforced with Grammarly Business rules, Vale for documentation teams, or a custom instruction pasted into ChatGPT for drafts. Canva brand kits carry the visual half of the guide for social and presentations.
Common mistakes
- Writing a 40-page guide nobody reads instead of a two-page one everybody uses.
- Leaving out the word list, which is where most of the real inconsistency comes from.
- Never updating it, so the guide still names a product you renamed two years ago.
Why does a style guide matter?
Consistency signals care, and customers read sloppiness as a hint about the service. A style guide makes editing faster, lets several people produce content that reads as one voice, and saves the same argument about commas from happening every week.
How does AssistBPO handle a style guide?
Our content and admin assistants write to your style guide from day one, and if you do not have one, they draft it from your existing material for your approval. Every document, email template and post is checked against the guide before it reaches you. Guide updates are logged so the whole team, including your backup assistant, works from the same version.
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