Stop content chaos with a simple style guide

Open your inbox, your website and your LinkedIn feed. If they look and sound like three different organisations, you have a content problem, not a copywriter problem.

It happens gradually. New people join. Agencies come and go. One team prefers formal language, another leans into emojis, a third writes as if they are pitching a tender. Nothing is technically wrong, but the overall effect is noisy and inconsistent.

For customers, partners and funders, that inconsistency makes you harder to trust. For your team, it makes content slower and more frustrating to produce. Everyone spends time guessing the “right” tone, then rewriting it later.

A simple style guide is one of the easiest fixes. It is not a big brand book. It is a practical cheat sheet that keeps your content strategy, design and copywriting pointed in the same direction.

What a style guide actually does

A good style guide answers a few basic questions so nobody has to improvise every time they open a blank page.

It clarifies tone of voice. Are you plain spoken or highly technical. Do you write in the first person. How much humour is acceptable. Instead of vague instructions like “professional but friendly”, it gives examples of sentences that feel right and sentences that feel wrong.

It sets language rules. Do you write email or e-mail. Are job titles capitalised. Which terms do you avoid because they are jargon. This sounds small, but it removes dozens of micro decisions that slow content work and create tiny inconsistencies across pages and campaigns.

It defines structure and formatting. How long are your headings. Do you prefer short paragraphs. How do you use bullets and pull quotes. A shared approach makes your copy easier to scan and your design team’s life much easier.

Most importantly, a style guide explains why. It links your content choices back to your brand, your users and your wider content strategy, so people understand the reasoning, not just the rules.

Building a simple, useful style guide

The best style guides start with what you already have.

A short content audit can surface examples of copy that already feel on-brand, along with pieces that clearly miss the mark. That gives you raw material and something concrete to react to in workshops.

From there, you can build a lean guide structured around a few headings:

• Voice and tone: three to five principles with short examples 
• Language choices: common terms, acronyms and spellings 
• Formatting: headings, lists, calls to action and link text 
• Examples: a couple of real before-and-after rewrites 

You do not need to cover every possible scenario. Focus on the 80 percent that comes up repeatedly: home and landing pages, newsletters, social posts and the kinds of documents that support tenders or EU project work.

If it starts to feel like a novel, cut it back. The test is simple. Can a new writer read it in under 30 minutes and feel more confident about writing for your brand.

Rolling it out without slowing teams down

A style guide only works if people use it.

Launch it with a short, practical session rather than an email attachment. Walk through real examples from your own website, proposals and campaigns. Show how the guide would change specific headlines, intros and calls to action.

Encourage teams to treat it as a support, not a policing tool. The point is to make content easier and faster to produce, not to catch people out.

It can help to nominate a small group of “content champions” across departments who people can ask quick questions. They do not need to be full time editors. They are simply your internal point of contact when someone is unsure about tone or structure.

Keeping your style guide alive

Content strategy and copywriting evolve as your organisation grows. New programmes launch, new partners arrive, audiences shift. If your style guide never changes, it will quietly become irrelevant.

Agree a simple review rhythm. Every six to twelve months, or after major projects, gather examples of content that worked well and areas where the guide felt unclear. Update the document and circulate a short summary of what changed and why.

You can also plug your style guide into other content processes. Use it as a reference during content workshops. Link to it in briefs for agencies and freelancers. Refer to it when reviewing drafts instead of relying on individual taste.

Over time, that small document pays back in quieter ways. Less rewriting. Fewer off-brand surprises. Faster onboarding for new writers. A website, set of brochures or EU project portal that feels like it is coming from a single, coherent voice.

When you treat your style guide as a practical tool instead of a box ticking exercise, you reduce content chaos without adding layers of bureaucracy. You give copywriting a clear frame to work within and content strategy something tangible that people can follow every day.