The secret to making your B2B copywriting, brand messaging and proofreading and editing consistent, is to formalise your house style and promote ‘one brand voice’.

But – what is house style?

It’s your brand’s personalised set of rules when it comes to writing – whether that’s articles, web copy, social media posts, proposals, or anything other content your brand puts out into the world.

It only needs to be a couple of pages, but it will help you maintain consistency across all platforms – and that aids readability and digestibility, and is subconsciously reassuring to your audience.

It’s a super-valuable document that really doesn’t need to be much work; in fact it actually reduces workload and builds more efficiency into your business.

What’s included in a useful house style document?

It’s different for every business, but yours could include:

• Do you write in US or UK English?
• Rules on things like capitalisation, acronyms, and punctuation conventions (e.g. hyphens, which always cause confusion!)
• Are contractions approved? (E.g., ‘you’re’ as opposed to ‘you are’?)
• Guidance on appropriate use of jargon
• Rules on use of industry-specific terminology and conventions
• Titles and subtitles in title case or sentence case? (E.g., ‘What Is House Style?’ vs ‘What is house style?’)?
• Rules on formatting (e.g. bold, italics, underlines) and layout
• Info on fonts, font sizes, bullet points, numbered lists etc
• Tiny details that make the difference, like do you add full stops to every point in a bulleted list? Do you add a full stop at the end of a heading? What’s your stance on the divisive Oxford comma (in the right context, I love an Oxford comma, for what it’s worth)
• How do you deal with widows and orphans?
• How do you add sources in various contexts? E.g., hyperlinks? In a footnote?
• Guidance on best practice, and approved/unapproved language to use around equality, diversity and inclusion
• Guidance on use of swear words, emojis etc
• A ‘bin’ for unapproved words and clichés you want to sack off

This level of attention to detail might seem like splitting hairs, but the devil is in the detail and it’s all stuff that proofreaders toil over every day.

It doesn’t have to be an epic document (but it’s worth checking out some that are, like the BBC News Style Guide).

Important things to remember

1. It should be ‘owned’ by one person – your “Brand Guardian” – who is responsible for maintaining and updating it.
2. It should be reviewed and recirculated every quarter.
3. It should be kept in a central place so everybody has access to it.
4. It should be given to anyone proofreading or copywriting for your business. They will likely have questions as they get to know your brand, and this can be helpful for developing the document further.

There’s huge value in formalising your brand’s house style – it makes life easier for everyone writing for your business. It can be used as an extension of your brand voice guidelines, to be incorporated into your overall brand guidelines.

Need help developing your own set of house style guidelines? Give me a shout.