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Topic: Writing a style guide
| Author | Message |
| liz.nicole | Posted – 7/27/2007 1:19:29 PM | show profile | email poster I'm newly in charge of copyediting at a small digital media company and need to create an in-house style guide. A client (a hospital) just asked me to develop an in-house guide for all their online media too! For background, prior to last month I'd never worked in online media, or with medical subject matter. Can anyone tell me how to write a style guide? Further, how might my company's guide differ stylistically from a hospital's or pharmaceutical company's? |
| writesonwater | Posted – 7/27/2007 2:19:32 PM | show profile | email poster So in addition to standard deviations in style within those industries, you need to list the things their company does uniquely. The way they communicate, their little quirks, how it's always done, for consistency. Generally, style guides are organized into categories -- unique spellings, usage, titles, degrees, capitalizations, references, online, etc. Do they use "says" or "said." Typically, done in bulleted form. It can also incorporate tone, and this is very helpful. By googling other companies -- even their competition -- you may be able to get hold of a similar style guide. Lots of publications or organizations havestyleguides. Universities come to mind as some I've seen online. One way to do it could be to find a similar guide, use those as a starter and ask a couple key communicators within the organization to look it over and check for differences and additions. You can also go through the Chicago Manual of Style or AP Style Guide (or related portions) with a couple helpful souls and have them point out differences in handling. If this seems beyond their desire to elucidate, you could try taking several AP stories that are medically/health related, and ask them to go through them and correct for their style. Another way is to look at their copy (website, other things they've published) and pretend to edit the copy, while looking for style differences, which may jump out at you. Spelling out states, capitalizing all titles. One trade publication that deals with the corporate world does this, for example: Jane Doe is vp of marketing at Woods Leland. That jumps out at me, looks like an error, but is how they handle vice president. In the medical world, I bet their company has decided ways of handling things like diseases, Latin terms, initials after doctors' and nurses' names, common abbreviations (is it DTs or delirium tremens?) -- that sort of thing. |
| liz.nicole | Posted – 7/30/2007 11:10:23 AM | show profile Much appreciate your posting, those are some really helpful ideas! |
