Consulting Journal: Writing

Writing: Style guides

by David Blakey

Whether you are a single free-lance consultant or a major multinational consulting company, a style guide will help you write better reports.

[Monday 26 August 2002]

Most printed periodicals - newspapers and magazines - have a “style guide”. A style guide is a document that describes the style of writing for a publication. The editors expect writers to follow the style guide. The subeditors will check the spelling, grammar and punctuation of submissions against the style guide.

Many style guides are publicly available. In Britain, the Guardian has its style guide available for download and the Economist has published its style guide in book form. The Consulting Journal has a style guide, and you should consider having one.

Why have a style guide?

There are three main reasons for having a style guide.

Consistency

First, it can be used to make sure that your writing is consistent. Whether you are a single free-lance consultant or a major international consulting company, a style guide can help in presenting your clients with written reports that have a consistent style. I am not saying that the style guide should be imposed to the extent that it stifles creativity and a writer's own style. It can, however, be useful in ensuring that reports follow the same basic set of rules.

Inconsistencies can be small and subtle. One writer might always put a full point after an abbreviation, such as “etc.” while another might always write “etc” without one. Someone reading a report written jointly by these two people might notice this inconsistency. This can be especially true of “standard” sections that are copied into reports. Someone reading them may notice inconsistencies in the use of hyphens, italics and capital letters, even though these may seem minor to you.

Accuracy

Most style guides list the correct spelling of words that are often misspelled. Most list the correct grammar for common grammatical errors. If there are errors that tend to occur in your writing, you can list them in your style guide. You can still refer to dictionaries and books about grammar; your style guide is not meant to replace them. If you are a consultant in system development, you may use the term “reusable code” often. It might be useful to put the correct spelling of “reusable” in your style guide.

Improvement

Your writing can often be improved. You may want to avoid clichés. Your style guide can list clichés and present better alternatives. It can also suggest how to write in an “active” rather than a “passive” style.

How rigid should it be?

A style guide should form the basis of the style of your reports. It should not contain so many rules that it will constrain the flow or enthusiasm of the writer's natural style.

There be as few actual “rules” as possible. All the rules and guidelines within your style guide should make sense; you should avoid including idiosyncrasies. It is better to explain why a particular style should be used rather than to dictate that it must. If you state that acronyms are abbreviated that are spoken as a word rather than by saying each letter, it explains the style of “Fortran” and “Nasa”. You should not need to list all the words that you want to have spelt in this way.

How do I get a style guide?

The newspaper and magazine style guides have been developed over some time. You should certainly refer to them on their websites or as printed publications. They are, of course, intended for journalists or columnists, so they can be much more comprehensive than you need.

Some of them are, to be honest, idiosyncratic.

Some of them are intended for a readership in one or other of the US or the UK, but not both. You may want to have a style guide that is “international”. At the Consulting Journal, I have decided to use British English except when American English makes more sense. So, I write the noun as “licence” because it is different from the verb “license”, but I use “organization”.

You can take an existing style guide and select from it those parts that apply to you and your business. You may find the Consulting Journal style guide useful; you can see it by clicking the link at the bottom of this article.

Then what happens?

You should give a copy of the style guide to anyone joining your organization. You should encourage existing people to read through it occasionally. It should not be so long that this will be onerous.

You should keep it up to date. Every time that a new decision is made on your writing style, it should be added to the style guide. This is one reason for having your own style guide rather than referring to someone else's. Another reason is that the original style guide can be changed by its owner. You would have to be certain that those changes would always match your own ideas of style.

The Consulting Journal style guide

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