By Dana P Skopal, PhD
Writing clearly and in a consistent format does help a reader. A writing style guide is a set of guidelines to make the writing and presentation readable and be in a consistent format. Some guides are referred to as an editorial style guide or a content style guide. Some may question why use these guides, as we studied English at school. However, when an organisation publishes content with inconsistent styles and grammatical errors, you would have to query the skill set of the writers and editors.
Many organisations have a writing / editorial style guide – instructions on how to present the written information. The guides have been now expanded to cover digital content and formats to enable accessibility for all users (see the list below). These guides provide great information, but when speaking with writers in the workplace, many of them admit that they have not referred to the style guide.
As a writer, you want to make your message clear for your reader; this entails good sentence construction, excellent coherence and correct punctuation. Organisational style guides and grammar rules exist for a reason. However, we presume many writers are not interested, which our facilitators see when covering grammar in our workshops – people’s eyes just glaze over. However, these people are often the first to complain that they cannot understand the long-winded documents that they have to read at work.
Perhaps there is not one easy solution to teach writing skills or editorial styles, but organisations could have short fun quizzes as part of their online learning platforms instead of two-day writing workshops. If a workplace writer can revise and fine-tune one grammar or punctuation aspect each week in line with the organisation’s style guide, steady improvements can occur. Interestingly, many of these style guides refer to the principles of plain English. So let’s re-think our approach to teaching writing and get across the steps a writer needs to go through to write clearly.
Here is a sample of style guides:
Australian Government Style Manual – https://www.stylemanual.gov.au/
Australian Government Digital Guides – https://guides.service.gov.au/content-guide/writing-style/
Digital Design System – https://www.digital.nsw.gov.au/
Content style guide – https://education.nsw.gov.au/about-us/gel/content-guidelines/content-style-guide
APA Style – https://apastyle.apa.org/
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