Duke University Libraries

Web Writing Style Guide

What is good web writing, focus on essential messages, style and tune up your sentences, use headings to break up text, write meaningful links, use images effectively, make content accessible, check your work, get technical and find help, additional resources.

← Web Content Guidelines

Good web writing:

  • is like a conversation . Think of your content as a focused conversation started by a busy person. When users come with questions, you provide answers. When users come to do a task, you help them. But because you aren't there in person, you have to build your side of the conversation into the site.
  • answers people's questions . If you think of the web as a conversation, you'll realize that much content is meant to answer people's questions. You do not want pages of FAQs. You do want to think about what people come wanting to know and how to give them that information as concisely and clearly as possible.
  • lets people grab and go . Breaking information into pieces for different users, topics, and needs help patrons grab just want they need and go on to look up their next question, do their next task, make a decision, or whatever comes next.

Web writing is more informal than other formats. For the Duke University Libraries, you should aim for a voice that is clear, credible, trustworthy, and welcoming.

Our web content is an extension of our interaction with users. We also apply our User Service Philosophy to web content.

Most people come to the web for information, not for a complete document. They don't want the user manual; they want instructions for the task they are doing. They want usable, manageable pieces. Ginny Redish,  Letting Go of the Words

When writing for the web, put the main point at the top of the page and history at the bottom. This is the opposite of the traditional narrative style.

Web users trying to grab and go prefer inverted pyramid style to traditional narrative style (Redish, 2007)

Use these guidelines for writing style

  • If you are telling people something about themselves, talk to users. Use "you."
  • When referring to yourself or the Libraries, use plural pronouns: "we", "us."
  • Define unfamiliar terms. Many terms we use in the library world are unfamiliar to outsiders. Don't expect everyone to understand. When in doubt, put a brief definition in parentheses.
  • Avoid acronyms and abbreviations, except when they are significantly shorter or common parlance. (Common parlance among librarians doesn't count.)
  • Be consistent. Use the same word or phrase to describe the same thing, and always spell it the same way.

Use these conventions for grammatical choices

  • When listing items, use the serial or Oxford comma .
  • Use Title Casing for the top-most title of the webpage. This is where Drupal asks you to list a required "Title*" above the page content.
  • Use Sentence casing for subsequent ( H2 , H3 ) headings.
  • Use one space between sentences, not two.

Use emphasis rarely and with intention

  • Use bold sparingly. Bold should be used for headings and then sparingly for any other emphasis.
  • Italics should also be used sparingly. Avoid making long paragraphs italic – you are making the text harder to read, not giving it emphasis. Exceptions are book titles.
  • Do not underline text. On the web, underline means a link.
  • Use all caps sparingly. Research shows that all caps are harder to read than mixed case.
  • Don’t emphasize too much. If you use bolded headings, short paragraphs, and bulleted lists, you should not need to rely on italics, all caps, or underlining for emphasis. These styles can make the page look messy and compete for the user’s attention.
  • Avoid exclamation points. We all know Duke is awesome! We love it! But let the content speak for itself.

Using headings is a critical part of good and accessible web writing. Headings allow users to determine what a block of text is about before they invest time to read it.

  • Make sure headings are tagged properly in HTML as H2 or H3 . Do not style body text manually to look like a heading.
  • Good headings are not trivial to write! Consider headings that are (1) questions that users may have or (2) statements or key messages.
  • Ideally, use noun and noun phrase headings sparingly. For instructions, use action phrase headings.
  • Do not use more than two levels of headings (below the title). In Drupal pages, use H2 and H3 for sub-headings, as titles are H1 .
  • Write the heading with words that users already know. Avoid unfamiliar terminology.

How do you know if you have good headings?

  • Read only the headings on your page. Do you understand what each heading means by itself?
  • Do the headings tell a coherent story?
  • Do they successfully give you the big picture? Can you get the gist of all the information from the headings?
  • Do they distinguish different sections? If you wanted only some of the information, is it clear where you would go for that information?
  • Link, link, and link to relevant information. If you mention a summer reading program, link to it. If you mention a faculty member, link to their bio page. Don’t make people search for something that you mention if it already has a page.
  • Make your links contextual. Use part of the actual referencing sentence as the link. Research shows that users like them to be 4-8 words in length.
  • Avoid burying links. Placing a link in the middle of a block of text is a good way to keep people from seeing it. Instead, consider placing it at the top, the bottom, or on its own line.
  • In general, links should load in the existing page ("parent"), rather than open a new tab or window.
  • Images on the web can be used to show an exact item (such as the shirt you are shopping for), illustrate a concept or process (how to check out a book), display a graph or map, or simply convey a mood.
  • Whenever possible, use pictures of people interacting instead of abstract building images.
  • Make sure you have copyright permissions to use any picture.
  • Find ways to style your images in the Visual Style Guide . Images in this page are styled using <img class="img-thumbnail"> .

Four places to find images

From dul flickr.

An example image of students around archive materials from DUL Flickr

From Duke Webdam

An example image of Duke Libraries from Duke Webdam

From Unsplash

An example image of Duke Libraries from Duke Webdam

Good web writing and design makes web content more accessible to everyone. The guidelines above are written with accessibility in mind, particularly with regard to users who are using screen-readers to navigate the web. ( What is a screen reader? )

  • Excellent headers make web content easier to skim. This is particularly true for users with screen-readers, who can tab through headings to find the information they want. If headings are not embedded in the HTML of the page or document, the screen reader will not be able to identify headings.
  • Screen readers can pull out all the hyperlinks on a page. This is one reason why writing informative link titles is important! Imagine scraping a list of links only to yield a series of "Click here"s and "More here"s!
  • Avoid posting PDFs on the web to convey content, unless you are sharing a document. PDFs are optimized for print. They can be accessible to screen-readers, but it requires a bit of set-up.
  • When posting images that convey substantive information, use alt text in the HTML code of the image to communicate the messages of the images. If the image does not convey substantive information, there is no need for alt text.
  • All good writing is re-writing. When you think you are done, look again. Cut your text to the most essential messages. Follow Steve Krug's Third Law of Usability: "Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what's left."
  • As much as time allows: read your work out loud, let the writing sit for a couple days and return to it, or ask a colleague for edits.
  • Review the Content Essentials Checklist .
  • Verify names, dates, phone numbers, etc., and double-check them for accuracy.
  • Keep your content up-to-date. Out-of-date content reflects poorly on the user’s overall opinion of the website and the Libraries. It also makes the information there appear less trustworthy. If you post something that needs to be updated later, mark it on your calendar so you don’t forget. Give yourself the time necessary to update your content.

Image of what the blue HTML button looks like

Toggle between "what you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG; "wizzy-wig") and other formats here

  • Like a style you see in a Drupal page but don't know how to re-create it? If permissions allow, take a look at the HTML page in the "Edit" view. Just don't save any changes.
  • Styles shown on the Duke University Libraries Visual Style Guide are curated from a larger selection of Bootstrap visual styles . You can find more ways to style lists there.
  • Drupal adds unnecessary spaces after some elements, such as hyperlinks. This is a known bug. They can be removed permanently by editing changing your editing view from WYSIWYG to HTML and not switching back, but this is a time-consuming effort that is not expected of you.
  • Stuck, have a question, or just want a second opinion? Submit a ticket to ServiceNow ( support.lib.duke.edu ), and someone with expertise with work with you. Select "Digital Projects & Web Services" as the category for your ticket.
  • Web Style Guide, 3rd Edition (full-text online) by Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton
  • Chicago Manual of Style Online (electronic resource: Duke access only)
  • Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability , 2nd Edition, by Steve Krug
  • Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works , by Janice (Ginny) Redish
  • Writing for the Web research from the Nielson Norman Group

Adapted and expanded from Letting Go of the Words by Janice Redish and Hampshire College's Web Writing Style Guide

web content writing style guide

  • January 3, 2024

Top 16 Content Style Guides 2024 (and How to Use Them)

As a digital product grows, so too will the number of content creators that contribute to it. A content style guide helps UX writers and content designers to keep the voice, tone, and messaging consistent across all platforms. Most guides include both general advice about language use and specific instructions that are company or product specific.

In the  UX Writing Hub ’s training program, we have a module dedicated solely to content style guides. After getting help from our amazing Facebook community members at Microcopy & UX Writing , we’ve collected the top 16 content style guides for you to use on your next content style guide creation journey.

Save it for a rainy day!

🧙‍♂️ Curious about UX writing? Try our free course A Taste of UX Writing

When I first heard about Intuit’s style guide, or rather content design system, it completely blew my mind. Intuit is the fintech organization behind finance solutions like TurboTax, Quickbooks, and Mint. They decided to develop a whole system where everyone – content designers, copywriters, marketers, designers, developers – can find not just language advice, but also a library of content patterns that they can use in their work.

I was so curious about their work that I recently invited their Principal Content Designer Stephen Curran to the Writers in Tech podcast (for the second time!). Listen to the episode here to hear how they developed their content design system. We also created a whole blog article on the subject of content design systems . Check it out!

screenshot of Intuit's content design system start page

The holy bible of content style guides. Honestly, people post about it on our Facebook group Microcopy & UX Writing at least once a month.

web content writing style guide

The neobank Monzo has a very distinct, friendly voice and tone. Their style guide is available to the public and it’s an absolute delight to read. Check it out for a tip on how monkeys can help you spot passive sentences . 🐒 In 2020, I had the pleasure of chatting with their lead writer Harry Ashbridge on the Writers in Tech podcast .

screenshot of monzo bank's style guide

The Microsoft Writing Style Guide replaces the Microsoft Manual of Style, a respected source of editorial guidance for the tech community for more than 20 years.

web content writing style guide

Canada Post Corporation

Discover the writing principles for the ways that Canada post add value to their digital products with concise and meaningful language.

web content writing style guide

Material Design is one of the most famous design systems out there. Explore their content section and learn how to write content like Google does.

web content writing style guide

Shopify’s ambitious content design system Polaris will help you understand how to think strategically about the language in your products and apps.

The Conscious style guide contains the latest observations, opinions, and style advice all in one place. It’s a top resource for everyone who wants to be more mindful about the language they use.

web content writing style guide

The mission of the UX writers of Geo-Jek is to allow users to use their app effortlessly — without friction.

web content writing style guide

UK Government

The single government representative on our list. I am happy a governmental service realized that they too can actually lead when it comes to creating conversational interfaces.

web content writing style guide

Highly detailed content style guide created by the UX writers and content creators of the BBC.

web content writing style guide

The Atlassian writing style is an open source system of their core company values, company mission, design principles, and voice and tone.

web content writing style guide

One method for creating a content style guide is to base it on another guide. In Buffer’s guide, they claim to follow Mailchimp’s style guide with some extra sauce made by Buffer.

web content writing style guide

To connect with their customers, Salesforce needs to talk in a way that resonates with them. They published their content style guide that shows how to do that.

web content writing style guide

University of Leeds 

This content style guide was created to help the people of Leeds University write more creatively and effectively in their day-to-day life at the University of Leeds.

web content writing style guide

The Apple Style Guide provides editorial guidelines for text in Apple instructional materials, technical documentation, reference information, training programs, and user interfaces. The intent of these guidelines is to help maintain a consistent voice in Apple materials.

web content writing style guide

Brand Voice and Tone in UX Writing

A key component of UX writing is the “Brand Voice and Tone”. These elements shape the user’s perception of a brand.

Brand Voice is the unique personality of your brand expressed through words. It’s a consistent style of communication that makes your brand identifiable. Your brand voice could be professional, friendly, humorous, or serious, depending on your brand’s identity.

Tone is a subset of your brand’s voice. It adds flavor to your voice based on the audience, situation, and message. For example, a friendly brand voice might adopt an enthusiastic tone in a welcome message and an empathetic tone in a support context.

Defining your brand’s voice and tone is crucial for a consistent user experience.

Here are a few steps:

  • Identify Your Brand’s Personality : If your brand were a person, what personality traits would it have? What language would it use?
  • Consider Your Audience : Who are you speaking to? What tone and language resonate with them?
  • Create Voice and Tone Guidelines : Document your brand’s voice and tone to ensure consistency. Include examples for clarity.
  • Train Your Team : Ensure everyone creating content for your brand understands and applies these guidelines.

As a UX writer, you may end up working in companies or on projects that take different approaches to their content style guide. If you join an organization that is already implementing a content style guide, great! Your job is to follow and optimize it continuously.

If you’re working as a consultant UX writer, or you are the first UX writer of your organization, you may need to build a brand new style guide from scratch.

Return to this list to find your inspiration and get that content style guide up and running!

Keep exploring

Everything you need to know about content design systems (and how they differ from content style guides) (article)

Building a content design system (podcast episode with Stephen Curran at Intuit)

Copy in the age of digital banking (podcast episode with Harry Ashbridge at Monzo bank)

Try our free course A Taste of UX Writing

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web content writing style guide

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  • UX writing processes 
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How to Create a Writing Style Guide [+Free Guide & Examples]

Corey Wainwright

Published: July 20, 2022

A writing style guide is essential for any business — especially if there are multiple content writers on the team.

marketer creating content according to writing style guide

As you create more and more content on your website and blog, inconsistencies are bound to creep in. One reason? Lack of clarity about the style in which you'd like to write in. Disjointed communication across the multitude of content creators in your organization can be a culprit, too.

Free Download: How to Create a Style Guide [+ Free Templates]

Either way, failure to decide upon accepted editorial guidelines is a recipe for inconsistent messaging. That's why at some point, most companies will need to develop a writing style guide.

web content writing style guide

Free Brand Style Guide Template

Take your brand to the next level with this free guide + templates.

  • Build your brand
  • Define your voice
  • Set image guidelines

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

What is a writing style guide?

A writing style guide is a document that sets standard writing, grammar, and punctuation conventions for a particular organization in the effort of maintaining a consistent tone and style regardless of how many content contributors are on the team.

A writing style guide indicates the basic rules of writing everyone agrees to follow to ensure consistency across all content, like whether you should capitalize the "a" after the colon.

Note: If you write content for HubSpot, you should not capitalize the "a."

But wait... if that's the case, why would I capitalize the "If" in that last parenthetical? Because "If you write content for HubSpot, you should..." is a complete sentence, thus warranting the capital "If."

These conventions are specified in our writing style guide.

If you found that train of thought terribly banal, you might think writing style guides are the most boring things in the world and have a burning desire to click away right about now. Au contraire, mon frère.

Why Writing Guides Are Important

A writing style guide saves you from finding yourself embroiled in a debate about whether there should be spaces before and after an ellipses, whether you capitalize "for" in a title, or when a number must be written out in full.

If the writing style guide bores you, just imagine how insipid that debate will be. The existence of a style guide means you can simply have the style guide handy as your little writing rulebook without having to sit through debates about blockquotes.

Style Guide vs. Brand Guide

A writing style guide is a set of standards brands use to define how to maintain a consistent tone and voice through written content. A brand guide defines design elements — logos, typography, color palettes — to create consistency in brand image and visuals.

Both guides are different in content but the same in function. They play an important role in how potential consumers view, interact, and remember your company.

In an effort to help you get started with your own style guide , this blog post will walk you through how to create a writing style guide and which essential elements you’ll need to include.

How to Create a Writing Style Guide

  • Review your brand’s mission and values.
  • Create buyer personas for your target audience.
  • Define your company’s voice and tone.
  • Outline branded words and phrases.
  • Establish guidelines for formatting.
  • Use a style guide template.

Before we dive into the important elements you’ll need to include in your writing style guide, let’s talk through the steps of creating one. Your guide should reflect your business, its goals, and your target audience. To start, you’ll need to:

1. Review your brand’s mission and values.

Why did you start your business? What is its purpose? These are two important questions that you ask yourself when you start planning and building your company. If you didn’t, ask them now. Define your mission statement . Outline your brand’s core values . This information will guide how you form your connections with your audience. It will allow you to develop an idea for how you plan to communicate with them.

Your brand’s mission and values should guide your decisions and ensure that you’re actively working towards your goal. They define and influence company culture by guiding your business to make decisions that are beneficial to the company and your customers.

It is important to note that this information can change. In fact, it should. As time goes on and your company evolves, it is necessary to review and update your brand mission and values to accurately reflect your current business model and operations.

2. Create buyer personas for your target audience.

To create your writing style guide, you need to know who you’re talking to. Imagine having one conversation with a baby boomer and another with a millennial. The way you communicate with them will likely be different. Those nuances speak to the importance of creating buyer personas.

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional, research-based representation of your target customer. This information should come from market research as well as actual data from your existing customers. When creating your buyer personas, envision your ideal customer. What are their days like? How do they make decisions? What challenges do they face? Ultimately, your buyer persona should look at customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals.

Once you identify your target audience and their buyer personas, you will have a better idea of how to approach communication.

3. Define your company’s voice and tone.

Establishing your company’s voice and tone can be challenging because the two concepts are easily confused.

Your company voice is how you want to be perceived by your audience. It encompasses how your brand messaging will be delivered. Do you want to come across as witty or friendly? For example, while Starbucks' brand voice is expressive, Coca-Cola’s is positive. When defining your voice, remember that this will not change throughout your writing. If you establish your company as “friendly,” it should be incorporated into all of your messaging.

Although your brand voice should stay the same, your tone might change. The brand tone refers to how you plan to express your voice. The subtleties in tone lie completely with who your audience is. Imagine a friend asks if you want to join them for dinner, and you reply “Okay.” Cultural cues would likely have them thinking that you’re not too keen on attending. However, if you responded with “Definitely!” they might think you’re excited to go. Even though both responses show that you are willing to eat dinner with them, the connotation changes between words.

As you build your voice and tone, decide what emotion you want your writing to take on. Will it be positive, neutral, negative, or something in between? Again, your choice should mirror your target audience.

4. Outline branded words and phrases.

What are the keywords and phrases associated with your business? To keep consistency throughout your business, identify these words for your style guide. This should include specific spellings and capitalizations.

Take MSNBC for example. The cable channel has two logos, one with lowercase letters and another with capitalized letters. However, when the channel is written in copy form, it is always fully capitalized. This would be something to note in a writing style guide.

This should also carry into any slogans or phrases associated with your company. For their slogan “Betcha can’t eat just one,” Lay’s would need to make sure that their guide specifies the spelling of “Betcha” and that there is no ending punctuation. To look cohesive and professional, it is crucial to keep this consistency throughout all messaging.

5. Establish guidelines for formatting.

In addition to focusing on what is written in your style guide, you will also have to focus on how it is written. Your writing style guide should include guidelines for:

  • Bold, italicized, and regular text
  • Bullet points versus numbered lists

Formatting will allow your readers to skim and digest your content quickly. In addition, as they become acquainted with your style, they will come to expect your company’s organizational breakdown. Every business has the autonomy to choose how it formats its content. Make sure you develop a format that flows effectively for your readers.

6. Use a style guide template .

the-simple-template-for-a-thorough-content-style-guide_17

Download Your Free Starter Template

As you work through the above steps to build your writing style guide, you might draw a blank on how to format it. Use a template. Many companies have their style guides available to the public. Find a company that you’d like to emulate, use them as a starting point, and customize the guide until it becomes a representation of your business. See the “Writing Style Guide Examples” section below for style guides from companies like Mailchimp, Google, and NASA.

What to Include in Your Writing Style Guide

There are a few key sections to include in your style guide.

1. Style Manual

Style manuals are reference books that tell writers how to handle grammar, punctuation, and any special use cases. Most businesses adopt either the AP Stylebook or the Chicago Manual of Style . It's up to you to decide which manual you'd like your company to follow.

what to include in writing style guide: style manual

You can purchase online subscriptions to these manuals for your employees to reference, the login for which you should also include in this section of the editorial style guide to make access simple. You might find employees are more likely to reference these tools when provided with an online subscription that contains a search function instead of a paper book through which they have to flip to find their answers.

While these style guides provide a good reference point for basic grammar rules, you'll probably want to make some exceptions to the rules for the sake of branding, tone, and style.

Use this section of your editorial style guide to outline those exceptions and also to highlight some of the rules that commonly arise when writing for your company. Ideally, your writers would commit these rules to memory, regardless of whether it is aligned with or against house style. For example:

  • What do you capitalize? Do you capitalize the name of your product? Are there certain prepositions you want capitalized in your title despite your stylebook's recommendations?
  • What do you abbreviate? How do you punctuate those abbreviations? Would you type "a.k.a." or "aka"? "Okay" or "O.K."? Or "OK"?
  • Do you use an Oxford comma?

Listing answers to common questions like these in the first part of your editorial style guide will give people an easy resource to reference that will save you time and encourage consistency. Feel free to continue adding to this list as more confusions arise and get resolved during the content creation process . You're creating your own style guide, so feel free to borrow different rules from different style guides. The important thing is that you use the same rules consistently throughout all the content you create.

2. Commonly Troublesome Words

the-simple-template-for-a-thorough-content-style-guide_15

Image Source

Most companies have terminology that's specific to their industry, and not all of those terminologies have a universally agreed-upon spelling. For instance, if you write a lot about digital marketing like we do here at HubSpot, you'll find a lot of inconsistency around the spelling and capitalization of words like these:

  • ebook vs. Ebook vs. e-book
  • ecommerve vs. e-commerce
  • internet vs. Internet
  • website vs. web site
  • Facebook Like vs. Facebook like
  • Retweet vs. re-tweet vs. reTweet vs. ReTweet

Instead of debating how to spell, capitalize, or hyphenate these words, include a section in your style guide called "Commonly Troublesome Words" so writers can easily look up the proper spelling of these words according to your house style guide.

Advice for Global Companies

If you have global readership and create content for specific, same-language markets, you should include notes on whether you change spelling for those markets or retain your house style.

For example, if marketers from HubSpot's Dublin office write a blog post, should American editors change their spelling of "favour" to "favor"? "Internationalise" to "Internationalize"? These questions should be answered in your style guide, and the "Commonly Troublesome Words" section is a logical location to do that.

Similarly, if you are creating content in various languages, style guides should be created for each language.

3. Voice and Tone

what to include in writing style guide: voice and tone

This section of the editorial style guide should address something less concrete than grammar rules but arguably more important, and that is how your content should sound to the reader.

Can writers use the first person? How do you feel about the use of industry jargon? Think about the words you would use to describe your content in an ideal world. Which adjectives do you want your content to evoke? Conversational, educational, academic, funny, controversial, or objective?

You might think you want your content to be all of the above, but force yourself to prioritize just a few. Explain why it's important to achieve this style and tone in your content, and provide examples of content (excerpts are fine) that are successful in doing so, particularly if those excerpts exist on your own site already.

If there are stylistic characteristics your content absolutely should not have, include that information, too. Again, examples of what not to do are helpful here for the sake of comparative illustration.

When deciding on style and tone, be sure to consider your target audience and buyer personas in the process. Which style and tone would resonate best with them? This brings us to our next section.

4. Personas

what to include in a style guide: buyer personas

Buyer personas are inextricably tied to style and tone, so it's important to include this section either before or after the "Style and Tone" section of your style guide. Why is it so important to include personas? Because the style and tone you adopt should be informed by your target audience, i.e. the people that will be reading all this stuff you're writing.

That being said, the personas in your editorial style guide don't need to go as in-depth as the personas created by your sales and marketing teams . (Those might include detailed information like objections that arise in the sales process and how to overcome them, or tips on identifying these personas "in the wild" or when you get them on the phone.)

The personas in your editorial style guide should be more brief, simply pulling out the highlights that concisely explain who your target audience is, their pain points, how they like to be communicated with, the value your company provides, and a picture to give writers a visual to keep in mind when creating content.

Including personas in your style guide really comes in handy when you're working with freelance writers. If you're doing a good job with freelance writer management, you'll provide ample context to inform the content they're writing. A persona, and how that informs tone and writing style, should always be included when kicking off a new freelance writer project.

5. Graphics and Formatting

what to include in writing style guide: formatting

I know, I told you earlier not to get into the nitty-gritty with visual guidelines. This is still true. Your design team or agency should create a separate brand design style guide that addresses more nuanced visual things. (Can you tell I'm not a designer?)

You should, however, add a little information to your written style guide if your writers are ever responsible for creating visual assets and/or copyediting visual assets created by designers. Here are some common questions that may come up that will impact writers or editors:

  • Where can writers source images, and how do they properly attribute them?
  • When should images align to the right, to the left, or in the center?
  • Should text wrap around images?
  • What are the RGB and hex codes for your text and headers?
  • What typefaces can be used?
  • Can writers use italics, bold, or underlining? If so, is usage limited to certain occasions, like bolding headers and hyperlinks?
  • Which kind of bullets should be used (square, round, or other), and how should they align with the rest of the text?
  • How should numbered lists appear: "1", "1." or "1.)"?

Many of these graphical elements can be present in your content management system, but they can be easily overridden when writers copy and paste content from elsewhere with formatting attached, or by an overzealous writer with a flair for design. Outline these expectations in your editorial style guide, and refer those with more advanced needs to your brand style guide.

6. Approved and Unapproved Content

Great content often cites research and data from third party sources. Make your writer's job easier by providing approved industry resources from which they can draw, and even more importantly, resources from which they cannot draw. Break up this section of your editorial style guide into two sections: recommended and approved industry resources, and "do not mention" resources.

The information in the "do not mention" section should include competitors and unreliable resources, and it should also mention controversial topics and opinions that should be avoided at all costs. For example, many companies strictly prohibit any mention of politics or religion in their content, or have provisions that explain when it is acceptable to include and how to frame the discussion. Similarly, many companies work within certain legal restrictions, in which case this section of the style guide might provide instructions for receiving legal approval before publishing a piece of content.

This is the section of your editorial style guide to explain the intricacies of such controversies as they relate to your brand so you can prevent reputation management catastrophes.

7. Sourcing

what to include in writing style guide: sourcing guidelines

With great research comes great responsibility... and a lot of choices, unfortunately. Clear up the confusion around how to properly cite research by deciding on one methodology and documenting it in your editorial style guide. Explain how to create footnotes, references, links to external sites, or even bibliographies if they are relevant to your company.

This section of your editorial style guide doesn't need to be long. Just write down the rules and provide some examples of proper citations so writers can easily attribute their sources properly.

8. Examples to Show What's Right and Wrong

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Every section of your editorial style guide can benefit from real life examples of the concepts you're explaining, whether you include those examples on the same page or as an appendix at the end of the guide.

For example, when talking about proper formatting, include a visual example of a well-formatted blog post with callouts that detail why the elements are successful. If you're discussing grammar usage, provide an incorrect example, and then mark it up to show how a writer could fix it to align with your editorial style guide.

Bridging your requirements with proper executions from your actual website will help illustrate these concepts more clearly and cut down on follow-up questions and instances of exceptions to the rules you've laid out.

What Not to Include In Your Style Guide

It can be tempting to create the most comprehensive style guide of all time. But when documents get incredibly long, it can become a little hard to use on a day-to-day basis. Aim for "comprehensive, yet usable" by intentionally cutting some sections. Common sections you should omit from your style guide include:

Content Operation Notes

While content operations are the backbone of your content creation process, detailed information on the processes should not be included in a writing style guide. The action of submitting content to your editorial team is an irreplaceable step in getting content published; however, this does not add value to the style your writers will use in creating. Additional content operation notes that can be left out of your style guide include requesting slots on the editorial calendar or revision cycles.

Minor Visual Style Recommendations

Many teams fail to realize that a brand’s logo can affect SEO. For those who know this information, you may be tempted to include rules around logo usage or other visual style guide elements in your writing style guide. Don’t. With some basic exceptions, these would be saved for a separate brand or visual style guide.

Design Elements

As previously mentioned, writing style guides have little to do with the visual design elements of the brand. They affect how the writing looks, but they don’t serve your writers as they create. The following design elements should be left out of your writing style guide.

This section lists the fonts your brand will use and where they can be accessed. Typography sections also provide detailed information on when and where to use different fonts, as well as acceptable sizes and variations.

Logo & Variations

As important as your logo is to your brand identity, it holds little to no importance in the eyes of your writers. Providing an image of your logo to your writers may help them connect with the look and feel of the brand; however, extra details about variations and when to use them on print or digital content is inconsequential.

Color Palette

When choosing brand colors, they typically align with the feel of the brand. Bright colors are used to symbolize ‘happy’ or ‘fresh’ brands, while darker colors can make a brand seem bolder and more daring. While the color palette can help solidify the tone of the brand to the writer, it is still unnecessary. Everything they need to know should be expressed when you define your company’s voice and tone.

Your editorial style guide will simply guide writers by providing a set of standards to which they must adhere when creating content for your website. It eliminates confusion, guesswork, and debates over what boils down to a matter of editorial opinion among grammar and content geeks.

If you're ever unsure whether something should or should not exist in your written style guide, fall back on usage to inform your decision. If it's too long to be usable, cut it down; if it's too short to answer the most common questions, beef it up.

How to Get Others to Use Your Style Guide

If you put in all this work to create a comprehensive style guide, it'd be a real bummer if no one used it.

Here's the truth: Some people just aren't going to use it, no matter how easy you make it for them to do so. So, just accept that. But after you're done grieving, there are a few things you can do to increase the likelihood of adoption:

1. Involve other people in its creation from the get-go.

Instead of mandating the rules your entire company must use when writing, get a few people together to help create the style guide as a group. Ideally, this little committee will span more than one department to increase the likelihood of widespread adoption.

2. Make it easy to find and use.

Our style guide is available on our internal repository, so it's easy for people to find, bookmark, and Ctrl+F to get answers to questions quickly. Make yours similarly easy to access and use.

3. Keep updating it.

Your style guide is intended to be a living document. As new questions arise, make it easy for writers to ask questions about proper usage and get a resolution, and make sure that resolution is reflected in an updated version of the style guide.

Writing Style Guide Examples

If you want to see a writing style guide in action, check out the examples below from well-known companies like Apple, Shopify, and Intuit.

In Google’s style guide, they are very explicit with its principle to create clear, accurate, concise text. The company offers clear directives to write simply and directly, address users clearly, and more.

They also skillfully demonstrate examples of what employees should and should not do. For example, instead of saying, “Consult the documentation that came with your phone for further instructions,” their writers should write something similar to “Read the instructions that came with your phone.” With this guide, Google ensures that its text is inclusive to anyone, regardless of their cultural or language differences.

You likely recognize Intuit for programs like TurboTax and Quickbooks. While some companies have their writing style guide formatted as a formal document, Intuit takes a different approach. Their guide appears as a message board.

On one of their most recent updates, they shared new guidelines on when and how to celebrate customer wins. As you scroll through their guide, you will find voice and tone examples, word list updates, and principles on how to identify and replace harmful language.

The eCommerce platform, Shopify, has an extensive content style guide that walks its writers through voice and tone, accessible and inclusive language, grammar and mechanics, and naming. As it elaborates on its voice guidelines, it reminds writers that when speaking as Shopify’s voice, they should “be real, but not too tough or overly familiar.”

It directs writers to be proactive without being pushy by offering their customers sincere encouragement and practical advice. In addition to these guidelines, Shopify has created a list of acceptable vocabulary and abbreviations to ensure its messaging is consistent and clear for its merchants.

4. Microsoft

Warm and relaxed, crisp and clear, and ready to lend a hand: That is Microsoft’s approach to writing for its customers. Microsoft is another company with a different take on how it presents its writing style guide. With one webpage at the center, it links out to valuable information, including its “Top 10 tips for mastering Microsoft style and voice.”

The page lists other recommended content, such as information on bias-free communication and directives on how to write step-by-step instructions. Whether the content is for an app, website, or white paper, this guide keeps all Microsoft communication clear, concise, and consistent.

In Apple’s writing style guide, they immediately express their mission. Reflecting on the diversity of its customers, they stress the purpose of the guide — to write consciously and inclusively.

The setup that Apple uses is also very on-brand. Its style guide has “previous’ and “next” buttons, which mimics a step-by-step tutorial that one is familiar with if they’re acquainted with Apple products. Apple also encourages its writers to return for updates. Writing changes over time, so its writers need to adapt to the changes Apple makes to its writing style guide as they happen.

6. Mailchimp

Writing copy for a brand can be confusing. As you switch between media, there are certain nuances that you might have to take into account. Mailchimp does a great job breaking down these components in its style guide. It includes principles for writing technical content, legal content, email newsletters, and social media.

To facilitate the process for its writers, the Mailchimp content style guide has a hyperlinked section that allows users to quickly navigate through the webpage.

the-simple-template-for-a-thorough-content-style-guide_11

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is known for the complexities of outer space. In its style guide, it mentions that its purpose is to be consistent in its writing style and usage, so its readers avoid distraction from confusing terms and concepts.

The guide directs its writers to use The Chicago Manual of Style but also provides specific topics, including an overview of their editorial style as well as sections on gender-specific language, abbreviations, and figures and tables.

8. Yokel Local

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This example comes from HubSpot Partner Yokel Local. Their writing style guide keeps both their in-house contributors and their freelancers on the same page when writing and editing marketing content for clients.

You'll notice that they didn't go too far in the weeds, either. The whole guide is 15 pages in large, attractive lettering, and anything not explicitly stated in the guide is left up to the AP Stylebook and the Merriam-Webster dictionary. The simplicity is effective, and they clearly had fun designing the document to be cohesive with their brand guidelines.

Polish Your Editorial and Content Style

When it comes to running your business, you might assume that your words hold little weight when compared to your products or services. You’d be mistaken. While your products are central to your business, how you share information — the words you use — is critical to gaining new customers and maintaining existing ones.

Consistency is an important factor in managing a successful business. With a writing style guide, you will decrease inconsistent content and communication. You will equip your team with the tools and resources to deliver a strong, cohesive message that draws in your target audience. As you work to create or polish your writing style guide, this article will serve as your guide to get there.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in May 2015 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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When writing for the web, using plain language allows users to find what they need, understand what they have found, and then use it to meet their needs. It should also be actionable, findable, and shareable.

It’s important to understand how what you are writing fits into the overall content strategy , what the content lifecycle entails, and who is involved in the process. 

Why it Matters

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Identify Your Users’ Top Tasks

People come to your website with a specific task in mind. When developing your site’s content, keep your users’ tasks in mind and write to ensure you are helping them accomplish those tasks.  If your website doesn’t help them complete that task, they’ll leave. Conduct market research, perform a task analysis and other types of user research, and analyze metrics to better understand what users are looking to accomplish.

Knowing your users’ top tasks can help you identify:

  • Content to feature on your homepage or landing pages
  • Page headers and sub headers
  • A logical structure to each page’s content

How to Write User-Friendly Content

It’s important to target your audience when writing for the web . By knowing who you are writing for, you can write at a level that will be meaningful for them. Use the personas you created while designing the site to help you visualize who you are writing for.

  • Use the words your users use.  By using keywords that your users use, you will help them understand the copy and will help optimize it for search engines.
  • Chunk your content.   Chunking makes your content more scannable by breaking it into manageable sections.
  • Front-load the important information . Use the journalism model of the “inverted pyramid.” Start with the content that is most important to your audience, and then provide additional details.
  • Use pronouns . The user is “you.” The organization or government agency is “we.” This creates cleaner sentence structure and more approachable content.
  • Use active voice . “The board proposed the legislation” not “The regulation was proposed by the board.”
  • Use short sentences and paragraphs . The ideal standard is no more than 20 words per sentence, five sentences per paragraph. Use dashes instead of semi-colons or, better yet, break the sentence into two. It is ok to start a sentence with “and,” “but,” or “or” if it makes things clear and brief.
  • Use bullets and numbered lists . Don’t limit yourself to using this for long lists—one sentence and two bullets is easier to read than three sentences.
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  • Use white space.  Using white space allows you to reduce noise by visually separate information.

It’s also important to create an editorial calendar. You can encourage visitors to return to your site by keeping your content fresh and up-to-date, especially when working with blogs, social media, or dynamic content websites.

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How to create a style guide—with 14 style guide examples to inspire you

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You become identifiable and memorable in the internet's sea of sameness.

You create better, consistent, and high-quality content for your audience.

Your in-house employees and contractors stay on the same page.

I've spent a lot of time reading and developing style guides, and this article will tell you everything you need to know about building a content style guide, from what it is, to whether your company truly needs it, to how to put one together.

What is a style guide?

A brand style guide contains a design style guide and a content style guide. The former is a visual identity laying out how your brand looks : the color palette you use for your logo, the typography, and brand assets.

But for this article, I'll focus on creating a content style guide: the editorial guidelines for tone, structure, voice, and values . You see it in the copywriting on your landing page, in your social media captions, and all over your content marketing .

If you think a documented style guide sounds not-so-essential, I don't blame you. Not every company needs a style guide, but I'd argue that most benefit immensely from it.

Do you need a style guide: Non-negotiable or time-suck?

Can you deliver quality content that matters and meets business goals without a style guide? It depends.

If you work at a very small company with a handful of employees (just a few team members in the marketing department), it's not worth spending your time creating a style guide just yet. You likely have other business priorities to look into first. With a small team size, it's easy to work without tons of documentation.

It also doesn't make sense to invest in a style guide when you're at an early stage in your company. You're probably still experimenting with your messaging , value proposition , and brand values. Things will change.

You can't justify dedicating resources to building a style guide if you're barely creating any content.

If you don't fall into that tight bracket, you'll be better off creating a content style guide. Consistency in brand representation when speaking to your customers is crucial, and a style guide solidifies your brand impression at scale.

But the content style guide needs of an enterprise company working with a large team and freelancers differ vastly from a tightly-knit company growing rapidly. The former needs thorough documentation and effective document templates . The latter needs a breathing document that's frequently updated. And then there are some elements both segments require.

How to create a style guide (with 14 style guide examples)

Over the years, I've seen a vast spectrum of style guides—from 30-page eBooks to barely half a page of the essentials. Neither extremes are ideal:

Too much information is overwhelming, and readers won't retain the important pointers.

Not enough information leaves too much room for ambiguity and differences to arise.

The sweet spot is somewhere in the middle—three to five pages of essentials and skimmable nitty-gritty details.

Here are ten elements to include in your company's style guide. Follow the essentials and cherry-pick what you need from the optional ones.

1. Company and product details like mission, values, and goals (essential)

The first thing someone should see in your style guide is details about your company: who you are, what you sell, your mission, and what your values are.

A brief about your company and products might seem non-essential if you don't work with external contractors , but it's crucial for onboarding new employees and getting in-house employees on the same page. Not to mention: Having your company's overview at the top of the style guide keeps your values and mission statement top-of-mind.

I love how Zendesk has highlighted the brand attributes in its style guide and briefly explained how they aim to meet those characteristics.

Style guide example: Zendesk

Company details are also the place where you can mention guidelines around how to use (and not use) your company's name. Slack's style guide has this in a short, sweet, and succinct way.

Style guide example: Slack

2. Voice and tone (essential)

I've encountered brands who are hip on their Instagram but stiff and professional on their website. It always leaves me feeling…confused. How can I trust a brand that sounds totally different on each channel? It's inauthentic.

Your social media, content, and copywriting teams need to sound consistent and be aligned with your brand's personality . So take a moment to craft what impression you want to leave on your readers and buyers. Are you helpful with a streak of silliness? Or are you professional and straightforward with no BS? Help Scout's style guide is an excellent example of getting it just right.

Style guide example: Help Scout

Zapier takes it up a notch by sharing its own persona as a company and what role they play in its audience's lives.

Style guide example: Zapier

I definitely recommend writing something brief and similar to Zapier to understand who you are and how to speak to your customers in a few sentences.

But don't make this section too hoity-toity with no actionable way to embed your brand voice. Tommy Walker—founder of The Content Studio, former Global Editor-in-Chief at QuickBooks, first marketing hire at Shopify Plus, and host of The Cutting Room —says this is a common problem. The solution? He recommends sharing examples of "how we at company X say common things" to make it easy to understand how to interpret and use your brand voice:

"Style guides have a hard time holding up to multiple contexts. So it's up to the content lead to create their own interpretation of that [voice and tone] section so that it may be applied to writing itself."

3. Audience information like demographics, pain points, and how your product fits into their lives (essential)

Call it user personas or whatever you want: your employees and contractors need to understand who they're serving. Answer all basic questions like what's their job profile and what demographic they might be in.

But go beyond this and answer advanced questions too—like what are your customers' pain points , and what do they struggle with in their jobs? How else would your company's workers give customers what they want ? For example, Eric Doty—content lead at Dock —shares who their target customers are and what they struggle with in his onboarding guide for freelancers .

Style guide example: Dock

He says this takes top priority (sometimes over grammar preferences)—especially when a contractor is writing for Dock for the first time:

"Writing an article with us for the first time feels more like being onboarded to our team, so it's more focused on educating the writers about our viewpoint and messaging rather than having them focus on tiny grammar nuances or things that can be fixed in editing."

Also include how your product fits into your ideal customer's life and what problems you solve for them. If you have the data, add details about where most of your customers come from and what friction they experience in purchasing your product or service. GitLab's style guide has thorough details on its potential buyers—their goals, who they report to, their biggest challenges, and so much more.

Style guide example: GitLab

Intuit's style guide also has a section on communicating with customers in specific scenarios—like delivering bad news, writing emails, sending congratulations, and more.

Style guide example: Intuit

Do the same for your company if you have a large customer success team or sales department to have consistency in customer communication .

4. Grammar guidelines, word usage rules, and formatting information (essential)

Once you have the big elements nailed down, get into the tiny specifics. Make a skimmable section about your:

Grammar preferences (e.g., British English or American English)

Word usage rules (e.g., calling your buyers "customers" and not "users") 

Formatting essentials (e.g., making bullet points longer or shorter as they stack)

Shopify's style guide has an exceptionally well-written grammar section with examples of dos and don'ts, so nothing is unclear.

Style guide example: Shopify

I'd recommend adding examples similar to Shopify because it makes the guidelines and preferences clear-cut. But I'd also add a skimmable checklist into your style guide for freelance writers , external contractors, and busy in-house employees to skim before publishing any piece they write for the company. AI tools like Writer and Grammarly are a big help here because they help enforce editorial rules without too much human intervention.

5. External and technical style guide (optional)

If you follow an external style guide—like AP Style Guide or Chicago Manual —link to the handbook in your internal style guide for easy reference. Summarizing the critical pointers for skimmability gets bonus points.

Technical writing instructions are also essential for tech brands. For instance, Google's developer style guide has extensive guidelines on how to write tech-heavy text.

Style guide example: Google

6. Competitor information (optional)

Did your company do a thorough competitive market analysis ? Summarize it in your style guide. This ensures:

External contractors don't reference them in your content.

Every worker understands what your company is doing best and where it can improve.

Employees and freelancers highlight how your products are different and/or better in their customer communication and content.

Competitor analysis doesn't need to be a long-winded ramble. Keep it short and snappy. If this information is sensitive and you don't want to reveal it to external contractors, write, "we differ from our competition through X." For example, Hulu highlights they do ads better and don't do advertising fraud in their style guide .

Style guide example: Hulu

7. Channel-specific guidelines (optional)

Make different sections or variations for each channel. For example, New York University has a different style guide for social media with network-specific instructions.

Style guide example: NYU

While you want to have the same brand identity, voice, and personality on all mediums and distribution channels, there are some areas where you might need different guidelines. The images that work on your blog might not work for social media because of formatting restrictions, for instance. The same goes for writing principles because of the character limit on social media.

8. Media, SEO, and hashtag guidelines (optional)

Visuals are a vital differentiator for any brand. Your design style guide would largely cover how your logo and typography appear, but you also need specific guidelines for images you share on social media or your blog.

Maybe you splash specific brand-color designs on your screenshots to make them identifiable.

Perhaps you have certain dimensions or size preferences.

Or maybe you want your visuals to be from a specific stock site .

Highlighting these media elements in your style guide will reduce your workload because all workers will ensure meeting the requirements in their self-editing process . Groove's style guide is a good example of having quick media guidelines, but feel free to explain more if you have specific preferences.

Style guide example: Groove

Like media guidelines, your style guide can also include SEO guidelines and hashtag guidelines. But these can only be overarching preferences—like don't use more than 11 hashtags—because any more would be specific to the context of the post. Search Engine Journal's guest posting guidelines do an excellent job of showcasing their preferred SEO best practices.

Style guide example: Search Engine Journal

9. Best-performing content and examples of content you love (optional)

My onboarding checklist includes asking the client some examples of:

Their best-performing content

Content they love (from their own brand or another brand)

Knowing these two things help your in-house employees and freelance writers understand what works well for you in your content strategy and set a quality benchmark.

10. Resources to learn more about your company (optional)

Internal resources are far more valuable than they're ever given credit for. I proactively ask my clients in my content brief if they have any company resources I can look into. I've found a product course that helped me show off the best features, customer research data to help me speak the customer's language, and other precious insider info.

Sebastien Rankin, Senior Product Content Manager at Shopify and Founder of Rank Intent, says context about your company and services are essential components of a style guide: 

"Give writers enough context into your products and services, and how they link to your content's categories. Things like grammar and style are table stakes in style guides, but teaching writers how to write about your product in relation to a topic speeds up the editing process for in-house teams and enables them to publish content faster without sacrificing subject matter expertise or quality."

You might be underestimating how many of your in-house employees are also unaware of some of the existing resources. Include them in your style guide as a quick list. They can be:

Competitor analysis

Product walkthrough

Company announcements

Customer research data and trends

Any company course you've created

A list of FAQs made by the customer success team

Recording of a sales call answering a customer's objections

Podcasts and interviews your company's founders/executives have done

…and anything else that deepens the knowledge of your company

How to help your company implement your style guide

There's nothing worse than spending time building a thorough style guide and having no one even glance at it before publishing something. So how do you increase the adoption of your style guide in your company?

I asked Aaron Orendorff, Head of Marketing at Recart , and his solution is to create Google Docs and Google Slides templates with your preferences embedded and outlined: "The only real success I've had is honestly creating, distributing, and constantly telling people to use one of two templates whenever they start any Google Doc or any Google Slide."

This way, whenever someone in the company wants to build something new, they'll use the template—which has your preferred fonts, style case, and other small things enabled by default.

Aaron preaches that the template method applies to increasing the implementation of every type of style guide, whether it's content or visual: "The key to consistently using a style guide is embedding it as usable and functional templates directly within the platforms people use to create."

In the template, have a TL;DR header for all your long sections that can't be embedded (like spelling preferences and grammar nuances). This makes it super easy to remember information and ensures nothing gets missed before publishing any piece. Mailchimp's style guide has an excellent one.

Style guide example: Mailchimp

The style guide is a breathing document

The biggest mistake companies make is assuming style guides are a one-and-done deal. In reality, your style guide needs to be updated based on changes in your messaging, the product's UI, and branding transformations. For example, if you went through a huge rebrand , you likely need a few tweaks (if not more) in your style guide.

Mark it on your calendar to periodically revisit, revise, and revamp your style guide.

And when you update your style guide, write "this style guide was last updated on X date" to ensure no one misses the new changes. If possible, also highlight the modifications for quick skimming to save time. If you're using templates like Aaron suggested, update them directly so no one copies an older version.

Related reading:

Why a brand book is your business's key to building a strong brand

How to create brand visuals for free in Canva

Choose your words carefully: How to build a brand lexicon for your marketing

This article was originally published in October 2018 by Laura McPherson. The most recent update was in April 2023.

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Rochi Zalani

Rochi is a freelance writer for B2B SaaS companies in marketing, productivity, HR, and eCommerce. When she's not writing, you can find her engrossed in a fiction book or contemplating a Mary Oliver poem. Learn more at rochizalani.com

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Writing Guide

This guide was created for Harvard Library employees, but we hope it’s helpful to a wider community of content creators, editors, producers — anyone who’s trying to communicate a message online.

If you work at Harvard Library 

This is our website style guide. It helps us create clear and consistent digital content that’s welcoming and useful for our users. Please use it as a reference whenever you’re writing content for library.harvard.edu.

If you work at another organization

We invite you to use and adapt this style guide as you see fit. It — like our entire website — is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Speaking of credit: Several other writing guides inspired this one. Those include: MailChimp’s Content Style Guide , Harvard University Style Guidelines & Best Practices , 18F’s Content Guide , Federal Plain Language Guidelines , and City of Boston Writing Guide . These are great resources for additional reading on the topic.

We love to talk shop. If you have questions about this writing guide or the Harvard Library website contact the Harvard Library communications team at [email protected].

With every piece of content we publish, our goal is to empower our users so they can use our services and tools to get their work done and discover new ideas. 

We do this by writing in a clear, helpful and confident voice that guides our users and invites them to engage with us. Our voice is: 

  • Straightforward 
  • Conversational 
  • Trustworthy 
  • Proactive  
  • Knowledgeable 

Our voice is also positive — instead of rules and permissions, think options and opportunities. It’s also welcoming and accessible to all audiences. 

The Harvard brand brings with it a lot of history. We want to highlight our association with the positive attributes — credible, trusted, secure, historic, bold. But we also want to do our best to break down barriers, which means overcoming other attributes some people may assign to Harvard, such as elite, academic, exclusive, traditional.

Part of being credible, trusted, and secure is ensuring every bit of content we have on our website is up to date, accurate, and relevant to our users. 

The tips that follow in this guide will help us fulfill these goals. 

"Damn those sticklers in favor of what sounds best to you, in the context of the writing and the audience it’s intended for." —Merrill Perlman, Columbia Journalism Review

Things To Do

Write for the user first.

Before you start writing, ask yourself: 

  • Who is going to read this content? 
  • What do they need to know? 
  • What are they trying to accomplish? 
  • How might they be feeling? 

Put yourself in their shoes and write in a way that suits the situation. Remember: You’re the expert, not your users. 

Put the most important information up top

Users tend to scan web pages until they find what they need. Most people will only read 20 percent of a page . Use the “inverted pyramid” technique by putting the most important information at the top of a page. That’s the section users are most likely to read.

Choose clarity over cleverness

Say what you mean and avoid using figurative language, which can make your content more difficult to understand.

Address users directly 

Use pronouns to speak directly to your users, addressing them as “you” when possible. If necessary, define “you” at the beginning of your page. And don’t be afraid to say “we” instead of “the library.” 

  • Instead of:  The Harvard Library has staff members who can assist with research.  We’d write: Our expert librarians are here to help answer your research questions. 

Shorter sentences and paragraphs make your content easier to skim and less intimidating. Paragraphs should top out around 3 to 8 sentences. Ideal sentence length is around 15 to 20 words.

Use plain language 

Using words people easily understand makes our content more useful and welcoming. Don’t use formal or long words when easy or short ones will do. 

  • Use write instead of compose , get instead of obtain , use instead of utilize , and so on. Plainlanguage.gov has a great list of word alternatives . 

Use the active voice 

The active voice supports brevity and makes our content more engaging. 

Using the passive voice deemphasizes who should take action, which can lead to confusion. It also tends to be more wordy than the active voice. 

  • Instead of: Overdue fines must be paid by the borrower. We would write: The borrower must pay any overdue fines. 

How to recognize the passive voice: If you insert “by zombies” after the verb and the sentence still makes sense, you’re using the passive voice.

Write for the user with the least amount of knowledge on the topic

It’s not dumbing down your content. It can actually be harder to to make information simple and easy to understand. The truth is: even experts or people with more education prefer plain language.

Imagine your audience and write as if you were talking to them one-on-one, with the authority of someone who can actively help.  

Try reading your writing out loud and listen for awkward phrases or constructions that you wouldn’t normally say. Better yet, have someone else read your writing to you. 

Create helpful hyperlinks 

When links look different from regular text, they attract users’ attention. That’s an opportunity that shouldn’t be missed. 

When creating hyperlinks, keep these tips in mind:  

  • Meaningful links should stand alone and help users with scanning the page.
  • Write descriptive and true link text — explain where users are going and why.
  • Use keywords to describe the link’s destination — look at the destination page for context.
  • The link destination should fulfill the promise of your link text .
  • If linking to a PDF, indicate that. 

For example: 

  • Instead of:  This collection is available online here . Try:  Browse this collection online.
  • For PDFs:   Our pricing guide PDF  provides estimates for various reproduction formats. 

Break up your content 

Large paragraphs of text can lose readers. Using subheads and bullet points is a way to help provide clear narrative structure for readers, particularly those in a hurry.

Tips for breaking up your content: 

  • Add useful headings to help people scan the page.
  • Use bulleted lists to break up the text when appropriate.
  • Write short sentences and short sections to break up information into manageable chunks.

"Look for the clutter in your writing and prune it ruthlessly. Be grateful for everything you can throw away ... Writing improves in direct ratio to the number of things we can keep out of it that shouldn't be there." —William Zinsser, On Writing Well

Things to Avoid

Jargon or acronyms.

Jargon and acronyms are often vague or unfamiliar to users, and can lead to misinterpretation. If you feel an acronym or a jargon term must be used, be sure to explain what it means the first time you use it on a page.

We strongly discourage writing FAQs , or Frequently Asked Questions. Why? Because FAQs:

  • Are hard to read and search for
  • Duplicate other content on your site
  • Mean that content is not where people expect to find it — it needs to be in context

If you think you need FAQs, review the content on your site and look for ways to improve it. Take steps to give users a better experience.

Ask yourself:

  • Is the content organized in a logical way?
  • Can you group similar topics together?
  • Is it easy to find the right answer?
  • Is it clear and up to date?

If people are asking similar questions, the existing content isn’t meeting their needs. Perhaps you need to rewrite it or combine several pieces of content. Pay attention to what users are asking for and find the best way to guide them through the process.  

Linking users to PDFs can make your content harder to use, and lead users down a dead end. The Nielsen Norman Group has done multiple studies on PDFs and has consistently found that users don’t like them and avoid reading them.

Avoid using PDFs for important information you’re trying to convey to users. Some supplementary information may make sense as a PDF — or something a user would need to print. 

If you must link users to a PDF, be sure to let them know. For example: 

Our pricing guide (PDF)  provides estimates for various reproduction formats. 

Duplication

If something is written once and links to relevant information easily and well, people are more likely to trust the content. Duplicate content produces poor search results, confuses the user, and damages the credibility of our websites.

Before you publish something, check that the user need you’re trying to address has not already been covered.  

Style Guide

With some exceptions, we’re following Associated Press style guidelines on the Harvard Library website.

Here are some common tips: 

Abbreviations and acronyms

Spell out abbreviations or acronyms the first time they are referenced. Avoid abbreviations or acronyms that the reader would not quickly recognize. 

Capitalization

In general, capitalize proper nouns and beginnings of sentences. For nouns specific to Harvard University and other common academic uses, please refer to the Harvard-specific guidelines below.

As with all punctuation, clarity is the biggest rule. If a comma does not help make clear what is being said, it should not be there. If omitting a comma could lead to confusion or misinterpretation, then use the comma. We do use serial commas.

Compositions

Capitalize the principal words in the names of books, movies, plays, poems, operas, songs, radio and TV programs, works of art, events, etc. Use italics or quotes when writing about them online. 

One word, no hyphen. However, use the hyphen for  e-book and e-reader.

A plural noun, it normally takes plural verbs and pronouns. However, it becomes a collective noun and takes singular verbs when the group or quantity is regarded as a unit. 

Right: The data is sound. (A unit.) 

Also right: The data have been carefully collected. (Individual items.) 

Use figures for date, abbreviated month when used with a specific date. So: January 2018 but Jan. 2, 2018. Use an s without an apostrophe to indicate spans of decades or centuries: the 1900s, the 1920s. 

Headlines/Headers/Subheads

Capitalize all words that aren’t articles.

In general, spell out one through nine. Use figures for 10 or above and whenever preceding a unit of measure or referring to ages of people, animals, events, or things. 

Use figures for: Academic course numbers, addresses, ages, centuries, dates, years and decades, decimals, percentages and fractions with numbers larger than 1, dimensions, distances, highways, monetary units, school grades. 

Spell out: at the start of a sentence, in definite and casual uses, names, in fractions less than one. 

Phone numbers 

123-456-7890 

am, pm, Lowercase, no periods. Avoid the redundant 10 am this morning.

web, website, webcam, webcast, webpage, web address, web browser, internet

Harvard Style Guidelines 

Here are tips for Harvard-specific terms and other terms you may encounter more frequently based on the nature of our website. They're based on guidelines provided in the Harvard University Style Guidelines .

Harvard University Proper Nouns

Capitalize the full, formal names of:

  • Departments
  • Colleges and schools
  • Institutions
  • Residential houses
  • Academic associations
  • Scholarships

However, do not capitalize names used informally, in the second reference. For example, when calling it the center, or the department.

Example: The Science Center contains five lecture halls; you can reserve space at the center by submitting a room request.

The exception is to capitalize College, School, and University when referring to Harvard, as well as the Yard.

Always capitalize Harvard Library. Do not capitalize Harvard libraries. Be careful in referencing Harvard Library, so as not to give users the idea that the Harvard Library is a place. 

Capitalize formal titles when used immediately before a name.

Lowercase formal titles when used alone or in constructions that set them off from a name by commas.

Use lowercase at all times for terms that are job descriptions rather than formal titles.

Named professorships and fellowships are capitalized even following the person’s name.

Academic years and terms

Terms designating academic years and terms are lowercased, like senior, first-year student, fall semester

Class titles

Capitalize the name of classes. Course titles and lectures are capitalized and put in quotes.

Example: June teaches Literature 101. Professor John Doe is teaching “The Art of Guitar Playing” this semester.

Concentrations

Concentrations are not capitalized. 

Harvard academic titles

Unlike AP, use title case for named professors, like Jane Mansbridge, Adams Professor of Political Leadership and Democratic Values.

Treat all other academic titles as formal titles: capitalized when used immediately before a name.

The preferred format is to spell out the degree. Capitalize an individual's specific degree, but do not capitalize when referring to a degree generically.

For example: John Smith holds a Master of Arts in English. She is working toward her bachelor’s degree.

If abbreviating degrees, use capitalized initials with periods: A.B., S.B.

When referring to someone’s year of graduation, capitalize “class.” Example: John Harvard, Class of 1977, was in town for a lecture.

"Writing is an instrument for conveying ideas from one mind to another; the writer’s job is to make the reader apprehend his meaning readily and precisely." —Sir Ernest Gowers, The Complete Plain Words

Tools & Resources

There are tons of tools available online to help you accomplish the goals outlined above and test your content for readability. Here are some to get you started: 

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Writing Style Guide 101: How to Create a Content Style Guide

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Author: Deanna Grogan   |  Updated on November 22, 2023

Learn what a writing style guide is, why it is important, and how to create your own for your company’s content.

Consistent Content is Key

Download the style guide template.

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We create client-specific style guides so your content will always be accurate and consistent. Be the hero of your organization’s content output—download our FREE style guide template.

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Category : Search Engine Optimization   |  Tags : content marketing , Content Strategy

Table of Contents

What Is a Style Guide?

A style guide is a document containing all of the rules and guidelines regarding the creation and use of content for an organization. It is also called a style sheet or style manual.

Why Do You Need a Style Guide?

English is a living, breathing language that is constantly evolving—and always has been. Influenced by Germanic languages, Celtic languages, French, Norse, Latin, and more, modern English took hold in the late 1400s and has been growing and changing ever since. 

This hodgepodge of a language has been hard to wrangle, to say the least:

  • It’s why spelling bees were invented —and why they’re typically only common in English-speaking countries. 
  • It’s why William Shakespeare, inventor of literally thousands of English words , famously spelled his last name more than 80 different ways . 
  • It’s why you can be a “traveler” or a “traveller” standing “in line” or “on line” to buy an “aluminum” or “aluminium” can of “soda” or “pop” on “Presidents Day” or “Presidents’ Day” —and it’s all technically correct. 

So how do you decide which words, phrases, or spelling to use? 

That’s where style guides come into play. Style guides offer consistency. Instead of saying, “This is universally correct,” style guides say, “This is correct for us .”

Which Writing Style Should I Use?

There are many existing style guides to choose from. These more formal guides were created by publishing housing and newsrooms to make it easier to correct errors and inconsistencies. Popular style guides today include:

  • The Associated Press Stylebook : More commonly known as AP Style; used for news writing
  • The Chicago Manual of Style (CMS) : Used for print publishing; one of the oldest style manuals in America
  • Modern Language Association (MLA) : Most commonly used for academic writing

Instead of reinventing the wheel, we recommend basing your company style guide on one of these formal guides. Avalanche Creative uses AP Style as the basis for our style sheet.

What Is an Internal Style Guide?

An internal style guide, also known as a company style guide or house style guide, establishes grammar and style rules for an organization’s content. 

Company style guides typically consist of two main sections: design and content. They outline how the company communicates their visual brand—logos, colors, typography—as well as how they communicate through the written word.

Content Style Guide

Also known as a writing style guide, a content style guide builds off of a more formal style manual to create a list of rules and guidelines specific to your company’s written content.

Content style guides include the usual information about spelling and grammar, but they also include guidelines about other content considerations, such as:

  • Voice: The way in which your company regularly speaks to your audience
  • Tone: The way in which your company communicates, depending on content medium and context
  • Industry jargon: Consistent definitions for industry terms that may or may not be tailored to the specific context of your organization
  • Intended audience: Identifying the different types of readers that may interact with your company’s content
  • SEO best practices : Ensuring content is formatted properly so Google will connect your desired audience to your content, services, and products

House Style Guide Template

Interested in creating a content style guide for your company? Download our FREE template here to get started.

Design Style Guide

Also known as a brand style guide, a design style guide outlines a company’s brand identity. It serves as a resource for both internal and external designers.

Design style manuals cover many details regarding their company’s brad, including:

  • Logo specifics: Images, colors, typography, spacing
  • Logo usage: When and how a logo is used
  • Brand colors: Logo colors, accent colors, alternatives
  • Typography: Typefaces, font weights, usage
  • Image usage: Desired imagery, rules about photography, and more

Brand style guides are not concerned with what a company is saying, but instead with how it is saying it. A good example of a design style guide is Slack’s document on brand guidelines.

How to Write a Style Guide for a Company

1. choose a formal style manual as a base.

There are too many nuances to spelling and grammar to start your style guide from scratch. Choose an established style manual, like AP Style or CMS, to base your work on.

2. Add In-house Spelling & Grammar Guidelines

It’s only natural that your in-house operation will differ from formal style sheets in certain ways. Make your style guide your own by:

  • Adding in what’s missing: Formal style sheets are updated infrequently and may not reflect the ever-changing nature of the English language. For example, many companies had to decide how to refer to COVID-19 (COVID? covid? coronavirus?) before publishing houses got around to releasing their recommendations.
  • Changing what doesn’t fit: You can make changes based on your own preferences (as long as they are grammatically sound). For example, at Avalanche, we use AP Style, but we also use the Oxford comma when listing a series to avoid confusion (“I love my parents, Taylor Swift, and Ed Sheeran”), while AP Style does not (“I love my parents, Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran”).

3. Describe Company Voice

Having an intention company voice allows you to communicate clearly with your customers and build trust. They learn to recognize the way you write and speak. That familiarity makes it easier for them to trust your expertise, products, services, and recommendations.

Your company voice should reflect your industry. A law firm’s voice should be professional, authoritative, and clear; too much sarcasm, humor, or lightheartedness could damage the brand. On the other hand, a youth-oriented social media platform should be approachable and relevant; stern legalese would feel out of place.

Your style sheet is the perfect place to establish your company voice and offer advice for tone in various pieces of content, such as:

  • Newsletters
  • Social media posts
  • Emails to clients
  • Other website content

4. Address Industry Specifics

Many industries have specific terms or jargon that are unfamiliar to the average reader. Your content style guide is a great place to explain those terms and create standards for how and when those terms should be used.

Explaining concepts specific to your industry is helpful not only for your readers, but also for your writers. Whether you hire a new freelancer, add a full-time employee to your team, or work with an SEO content agency , a content style guide can make it easier to get new faces up to speed on all of the nuances of your industry. 

5. Incorporate SEO Content Writing Standards

A content style sheet helps your team create stronger content, but it’s worthless if no one ever reads what you’ve written. That’s why incorporating SEO content writing standards is a critical part of any company style guide.

By following basic SEO standards, you increase the likelihood that Google will connect searchers to your website for answers and potential products or services. Your content will set you apart as an expert that people can trust.

Make Your Writing SEO-Friendly with These Style Guidelines

  • Content headers: Strengthen your content with headers and subheaders that follow SEO best practices.
  • Links: Specify when to link to external websites and which websites are high-quality sources worth including in your content. Don’t forget to also set up standards for when and how to link internally to blogs and pages already on your website.
  • Word counts: Avoid being penalized for thin content by enforcing healthy word count guidelines.
  • Images: Determine the optimal size for images on your website. Consider enforcing standards for alt text so your images are accessible.

Free Style Guide Examples and Templates

Ready to create your company’s writing style sheet? Here are a few free resources to help you get started:

  • View our writing style guide example.
  • Check out examples from other companies .

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Creating a writing style guide in 8 steps (A walkthrough)

A writing style guide is a reference resource for editorial content creators. It helps people within your organization, as well as freelancers, to develop written content that aligns with your brand values and mission. Style guides support your efforts to provide a consistent customer experience across all communication channels.

Why your brand needs a writing style guide

Brands typically have two main style guides: one for branded visuals and another for editorial content. Approximately 90% of polled companies say that consistency is important to their public brand . Style guides ensure that current and prospective customers have a consistent experience with your brand whether they’re reading a blog post, watching a video or interacting with your social media content.

Whenever you produce marketing content for your brand, you need to adhere to your style guides. This includes when you outsource content production to an agency or freelancers.

But don’t think of your style guides as an official decree that never expires. Your brand needs to evolve along with the times to stay fresh and relevant. While the basic rules of grammar are unlikely to change, certain words, phrases and other elements of style may transform over the years. Therefore, think of your writing style guide as a living document that chronicles your brand personality. It is a reference point and guiding light for your writers, but one that allows for creative freedom.

What a writing style guide is not

A writing style guide is not like an employee handbook — it shouldn’t be overly long, and it does not need to cover every possible issue writers may encounter. In fact, your guide probably shouldn’t be more than 5 pages in length. Any longer and you risk bogging down your writers with too many rules — they’ll be so focused on adhering to the style that your content could suffer.

Likewise, your style guide is not the place to teach people about the basics of grammar. You should hire writers who already know the fundamentals. That goes for company policies, too. Unless your brand frequently produces content about sensitive topics, you don’t need to include guidance about topics about discrimination or inclusivity — save those topics for your employee manual.

Style manuals: A starting point

Here’s some good news: You don’t need to build your brand style entirely from scratch. Instead, you should choose an established style manual as a starting point. Editorial guidelines specific to your brand should branch off the trunk of the style manual, allowing your brand to take on a personality of its own.

So, which style manual should you use? Let’s take a look at the most popular options:

  • AP Stylebook: Designed for American journalists, AP style provides guidelines for grammar and citations. It is used by most media outlets in the U.S.
  • MLA Handbook: Developed by the Modern Language Association, MLA style is commonly used in academic writing and focuses on the aesthetic production and reception of scholarly inquiry.
  • Chicago Manual of Style: Created by the University of Chicago, the goal of Chicago Style is to help writers to properly cite sources and clarify meaning for readers.
  • The Elements of Style: This short style guide is intended to produce writing that is easy to understand, active and free of unnecessary details.

If you’re struggling to choose one, we recommend the AP Stylebook. Most readers are familiar with this style, even if they’ve never heard of it. Plus, it’s very accessible to people of all reading levels.

8 steps to create a writing style guide that uplifts your brand

As you create your content style guide, be sure to involve multiple stakeholders at your company. The best way to make sure people actually use your guide is to get their input during the drafting process. Here’s how to get started:

1. Review your brand values and mission statement

Whenever you develop any guidelines around our brand, it’s important to return to your main source of inspiration: your company’s values and mission. This will help you define your editorial personality. The way your brand speaks to its customers will depend on a variety of factors, and your editorial style plays a huge part in how your tone is perceived.

2. Define your editorial style and tone

Your editorial style guide is intended to help multiple writers produce content that is unified in a way that reflects your brand values and relates to your target audience. For example, B2C brands usually seek to show that they understand customer needs and relate on a personal level. B2B brands, on the other hand, are typically more formal and demonstrate thought leadership.

Use adjectives that describe your brand personality. For example:

  • B2C brand: “Our brand is conversational and isn’t afraid to be funny. We are unapologetically authentic, but never crass. We laugh with our customers, never at them. Our authenticity means we care about our customers and the issues that affect them at a social and emotional level.”
  • B2B brand: “Our brand is objective and we’re not afraid to be controversial when we’re pushing against the barriers found within our industry. We’re sophisticated, but not egotistical. Our confidence comes from experience, which includes both successes and failures. We’re always learning and we use our expertise to benefit our clients.”

3. Address common spelling and grammar issues

Be sure to note any exceptions your brand makes that divert from your chosen style manual. For example, the AP Stylebook advises against using serial commas, also known as the Oxford comma, but you might choose to use it anyway.

Other common grammar guidelines include:

  • Abbreviations: You might require writers to spell out phrases on the first mention and abbreviate on the second reference. Or, you might include the abbreviation in parentheses upon the first mention.
  • Capitalizations: Make a note of any non-standard capitalizations or lowercase words.
  • Passive and active voice: Provide examples of when passive voice is acceptable to use.
  • Bulleted lists: Will you always end list items with a period, or only when they are full sentences?
  • Quotation marks: Single or double quotes?
  • Hyphens: Is it OK to use an em dash or a hyphen for parenthetical phrases? Should you hyphenate phrasal adjectives?

4. Include branded words and phrases

Always include branded words in your style guide. Make a note of any usual spellings or capitalizations. For example, your brand name might be lowercase in logo form, but use a capital letter when written out. This is where consistency is crucial, so don’t leave any room for interpretation here.

5. Provide examples of how to speak to different buyer personas

If your brand speaks to multiple buyer personas, or operates in several global markets, you’ll need to note important differences. These could include spellings (e.g. color vs colour) or they could be a matter of tone. For example, a software company might use more technical language when writing content for developers, and more informal language when developing content for end-users.

6. Explain how editorial text complements branded visuals

Oftentimes, editorial content will appear alongside branded visual elements, such as in an advertisement, eBook or infographic. While it’s not necessary to fully detail your visual style guidelines here, make a note of anything that will help writers to collaborate with visual designers. For example, it’s helpful to note how many words can fit on each page of your white paper template.

7. Create a ‘do not mention’ list

Make a list of topics that writers should never mention. Many brands make a point to never mention politics or religion, for example. It may also be a good idea to provide guidance for when those topics are unavoidable. In some cases, you’ll need to consult with your company’s legal team to understand any applicable restrictions.

8. Offer examples of approved sources

Provide a list of approved resources — or at least types of resources. For example, you might tell your writers that it’s OK to use content from .edu and .gov websites only. Also make sure to develop a consistent citation style. On the web, a hyperlink will usually suffice, but you may also want to include a bibliography at the end of certain pieces of writing. Create examples of citations so your writers don’t need to figure it out for themselves.

Make your style guide accessible

Your editorial style guide can be simple. Some companies have a simple text document that explains the basics. However, you should consider designing your writing guide so it is easy to understand at a glance. Then, make sure it is easy to access — put it on your company’s intranet or in an otherwise central location where writers can reference it as needed.

To help your content developers, your content style guide shouldn’t stand alone. It should accompany other reference materials such as visual style guides, buyer personas, industry research and any other resources that might provide insight into your customers and your market.

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“Complex issues … written about patiently, clearly, and accurately.”

Four Web Writing Style Guides from which to Borrow

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It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a website in possession of a shiny new design, must be in want of good content. Unfortunately, the process of auditing, revising, migrating, and creating quality content can be daunting. This is why it often gets left to the end of a project and then frantically hashed out in last minute skirmishes over what’s “good enough for now.”

The value gained from quality content—to say nothing of an effective content strategy—is well worth the price of engaging seasoned content professionals early on and heeding their advice. Nonetheless, there are a few DIY steps that even small or resource strapped teams can take to ensure that content effectively meets the needs and proclivities of users and business alike. One of these steps is to create a web writing style guide.

Meet the Web Writing Style Guide

A web writing style guide helps content creators and revisers write effectively for the web and in a style that is consistent with an organization’s brand and image. We all know “how to write,” of course, but writing content for the web is different than writing reports, presentations, or email. Writing content for broad consumption in the “voice” of an organization or brand is also not something that most folks tasked with “helping out with the content updates” have much experience with.

A style guide reduces the effort needed to create quality content by bridging these knowledge and experience gaps. Style guides are sometimes framed as “enforcement tools,” but I like to think of them more as a cheat sheets. Once a style guide is created, content creators don’t have to make decisions about case, or voice, or sentence length, or target vocabularies. They can instead focus on creating good content that creates value for their readers by effectively conveying information.

Creating a Style Guide of Your Very Own

Style guides can range in scope from a few printed pages, to scores of sections on a dedicated sub-site. If you’re just starting out in creating a web writing style guide for your organization or project, don’t let the expansiveness of guides on dedicated sites discourage you. Rather, use these as resources from which to borrow parts to create a starting point for the guide your content creators need. From that foundation you can build and fine tune over time—none of the comprehensive guides you see online sprung into existence all at once.

Here are four guides to help you get started:

  • Mailchimp Content Style Guide . Mailchimp’s guide is a feast of writing advice both for the web in general and for channeling Mailchimp’s distinct style. If you borrow material form the latter category, be sure it fits with the voice of your organization. Mailchimp’s guide is definitely on the “comprehensive” end of the spectrum. Mercifully, it also includes an excellent one-page TL;DR .
  • Gov.UK Content Design Guide . The Gov.UK guide provides excellent “web writing in general” resources, as well as journalistic direction for those writing for the UK’s government sites. Short sections with salient subtitles, examples, and bulleted lists make this guide easy to understand—and easy to borrow from.
  • BBC News Style Guide . This BBC guide is less geared toward writing for the web and focuses instead on fostering consistency when there are a lot of authors involved. It does this by providing guidance on capitalization, pluralization, homophones, and preferred spellings. Consistency at this level helps create a coherent “voice” without an overtly branded character (such as one sees with Mailchimp). Most organizations won’t need as much direction as the BBC provides here, but including direction around a few high-impact elements can go a long way to heading off collisions in mechanics and style.
  • US Department of Education . This concise, easily scannable guide covers the most basic elements of writing for readability, findability, and comprehension on the web. It also links out to the sources that support its recommendations. This is an excellent way to position a writing guide as a resource for writers, rather than as a constraint on them.

Bringing It All Together (And One More Example)

How you bring your guide together will depend on the needs and goals of your project and organization. A recent client of mine, for example, wanted a style guide they could easily print out so they didn’t need yet another thing on screen as they were revising content. I created a document informed by our research—and helped out by some of the sources above—that was easily scannable and fit on two double-sided pages. For this project, I also included guidance on the use of targeted keywords, since this was an important element of our redesign process. I’ve posted a lightly scrubbed version of this guide in Google Docs for your perusal (and, of course, borrowing).

Once you have the basics down, you now have a foundation upon which to build. Sarah Richards’s Content Design is an excellent resource for moving your content design process to the next level. Still feeling a bit overwhelmed? Please do drop me a note below; I’d love to hear more about your project and chat about how I can help.

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Writing Spaces Web Writing Style Guide

(6 reviews)

web content writing style guide

Matt Barton, St. Cloud State University

James Kalmbach

Charles Lowe

Copyright Year: 2011

Publisher: Grand Valley State University

Language: English

Formats Available

Conditions of use.

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike

Learn more about reviews.

Reviewed by Cara Miller, Assistant Professor of English, Anderson University on 2/5/20

The introduction of the book notes that it isn't focused&nbsp;on writing in general but rather writing on social media sites. I thought that overall, the book did a great job covering the different aspects of web writing, including rhetorical... read more

Comprehensiveness rating: 4 see less

The introduction of the book notes that it isn't focused on writing in general but rather writing on social media sites. I thought that overall, the book did a great job covering the different aspects of web writing, including rhetorical considerations, issues of accessibility, copyright, and coding. There was a lot of practical how-to information as well as links to other more in-depth resources. I did think that a bit more might have been said about the rhetorical considerations of audience, genre conventions, etc. I also found that several of the resource links were broken or out of date.

Content Accuracy rating: 4

I believe most of the content in the book about social media and web genres was accurate, but because the book was written in 2009, there are some things that have changed that make some of the content inaccurate. For instance, the authors claim that Internet Explorer is the most popular Web browser. There are also different social media platforms that are now available that weren't mentioned.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 3

The general concepts about rhetoric and the principles of how to use and think about online technologies when designing/publishing texts is still relevant. Again, many of the links don't work, and I think some of the more specific "how to" guides are out of date since technology has advanced so much since the book was published. For instance, the book mentions how helpful Google Reader is, but that particular program has been discontinued. The TextWrangler program that the authors recommend for Macs is no longer supported by newer Macs. These are just a couple examples of how the book is somewhat out of date.

Clarity rating: 5

The authors mention that the book is tailored toward college students and that they intentionally left out more technical jargon. Although the text was sometimes too informal for my taste, I thought the information was easy to understand and that the authors did a nice job of providing clear explanations, making numbered or bulleted lists that were easy to follow, and putting keywords in bold that were then defined. 

Consistency rating: 5

Overall, the book seemed consistent in the purpose of introducing readers to the concept of web writing and all of the rhetorical and technical considerations. 

Modularity rating: 4

Each chapter is easy to read and focused on a specific aspect of web writing, which makes it easier to assign a single chapter or even a short section from a chapter. On the other hand, there are references to other parts of the book, which makes some of the sections less independent of one another.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 5

The book is organized in a way that makes sense and is easy to follow. It begins with a more general section "Writing in the Genres of the Web" that makes distinctions between web writing and other types of writing. It discusses what the different web genres and conventions are before moving into the second section about "The Rhetoric of Web Pages" and what the rhetorical and technical issues are for designing and publishing web pages. Concepts are scaffolded effectively with a firm foundation in the concept of rhetoric.

Interface rating: 4

The interface is clean with plenty of white space and text that is readable. The images are clear and easy to follow. There are hyperlinks that often provide helpful information from other sources, though many no longer link to relevant information due to broken links or outdated pages. It was helpful that the contents page in the beginning provides direct links to corresponding sections of the book. This made navigation quicker and easier.

Grammatical Errors rating: 4

Overall, the writing is free from errors, though I noticed a couple of minor issues related to grammar, formatting, and the convention of calling authors by their last name instead of their first. These weren't errors that made the text difficult to understand or follow, but they were a bit distracting in the few areas when I noticed them.

Cultural Relevance rating: 4

Nothing came across as culturally offensive, though many of the external sources that are referenced are written by white men. The voices within the text don't seem to be very diverse. On the other hand, there is a short discussion about being culturally sensitive when it comes to rhetorical choices in a text and the values that are being communicated. The book also talks about accessibility issues for people with some sort of hearing or visual impairment, which is an important consideration related to inclusion.

I will teach a Writing for the Media class in the fall, and I could definitely see myself drawing from different portions of this textbook, especially the sections that discuss rhetorical considerations and genre conventions. It couldn't be a stand-alone textbook for a course, especially since so much of the practical how-to information and resource links are out-dated, but different sections of the book could be brought in as reading assignments or discussion/class activities. I would have really appreciated a few classroom activities or perhaps assignment ideas, which would have made the textbook even more practical as a teaching tool.

web content writing style guide

Reviewed by Cathy Carroll , Journalism Instructor, Central Oregon Community College on 6/19/19

The guide is fairly comprehensive, except that it is missing more updated tactics. read more

Comprehensiveness rating: 3 see less

The guide is fairly comprehensive, except that it is missing more updated tactics.

It is accurate, but some information is outdated.

In the introduction, some evidence that it was written in 2011 and is somewhat outdated includes: "Clicking a link is a lot easier than driving down to the library to find the book or article in question. " Younger readers may find the following kind of information obvious, but it may serve older/nontraditional college students. For example, "Writing for the web also has built-in community features—it’s a lot faster and easier to get feedback from your readers and have discussions about your texts when you put them online." And: "In addition, the web is no longer accessed only on desktop computers and laptops. Visitors to your site may be using a mobile phone’s smaller screen, which means they will have different needs than readers using a full-size monitor. Conversely, Internet TVs are becoming more common, and before long, many people will use iPads or An-droid tablets as their primary device for reading the web." Yet, this information holds true:
 With such variety in screen sizes and resolution, the challenge becomes making sure your content looks good across multiple web browsers, platforms, and devices. Since you can’t be sure how people will access your stuff, keep the design elements simple so that browsers can accommodate it.

An example of outdated information that needs updating is that 
Twitter initially had a limit of 140 characters per tweet but now the limit is 280 characters.
 Another example, includes a couple of broken links, one referring to the defunct Google Reader.

Much of the information still is useful, such as: "
If you want to make your blog standout, take strong positions on a particular subject or theme and write in a colorful, fun way."

And: "A good rule of thumb for dealing with strangers online is to be ten times more polite and friendly than you normally are."

The text is extremely easy to read and provides definitions and links to further define technical terms.

The guide offers a useful framework and terminology which is easy to follow.

Modularity rating: 5

Just as the guide dictates, it uses clear subheads and examples with illustrations. This guide does a commendable job of achieving an easy-to-read format.

The guide does an excellent job of taking the reader from simple concepts and progressing to ones that are more complex in a clear, logical way.

The only issues here are a few broken links or redirects due to outdated information.

Grammatical Errors rating: 5

The grammar is clean, which makes it easy to read.

Cultural Relevance rating: 5

It is not offensive, and includes at least one inclusive, sensitive reference: "Now that you are writing for the web, you might also be expecting a global audience. Did you know that colors symbolize different meaning in other cultures? Check out Color Meanings by Culture at The International Business Edge. For instance in Japanese culture, red symbolizes life."

So much of this information changes rapidly in the digital world. Core concepts about attracting readers, ethics and legal standards do not change, however, and so this guide is still useful — some sections more than others.

Reviewed by Joseph Amdahl, Adjunct, Chemeketa Community College on 6/20/17

This textbook does a good job of covering the basics of web writing (style) and includes a clear and effective Contents page to show the reader what the book includes. The textbook would benefit from additional content and read a bit thin at about... read more

This textbook does a good job of covering the basics of web writing (style) and includes a clear and effective Contents page to show the reader what the book includes. The textbook would benefit from additional content and read a bit thin at about 75 pages. Also, giving more examples of successful online posts would benefit students. The Resources page would be useful to a student. Some excellent links included throughout the text.

The content of this book is unbiased, accurate, error-free. The evolving nature of the internet makes this textbook one that would need consistent updates and editions.

Given how quickly the internet evolves, this textbook will need to be consistently updated. However, I found a lot of useful information here, including the difference between sans fonts and non-sans fonts. While reading, I kept trying to understand the intended audience and their needs. For example, the subcategories: "what is a blog?" and "what about Twitter?" -- the relevance of this content is contingent on audience -- would most students already have a grip on this material?

The authors of this textbook did a marvelous job of writing clear and efficient prose. The book reads very well. They took a seemingly dry subject and infused their language with humor and pizazz(I really enjoyed the Matrix references and conversational writing voice). They also did a good job of explaining why the concepts they were covering were useful to the reader. So not only did they provide quality content, but they did a good of explaining why that content was important. Any reader will be able to connect to the voices of these writers. They understood that the employed jargon might be lifeless on the page and they worked hard to combat that.

Consistency rating: 3

The book starts out strong but by the end -- it fizzles out. There was no conclusion to this textbook. No wrap-up. The textbook just ends on coding and creating a web page. To be honest, I didn't understand if this ending was a choice by the contributors or if they ran out of content? Is this text a work in progress? They do list some resources at the end. Very confusing ending given how careful they were to lead the reader through the majority of their ideas.

Modularity rating: 3

The contributors to this text did a good job of breaking the textbook into manageable sections (two main ones) -- this would make assigning reading for this textbook fairly easy for an instructor. However, chapter titles would add a lot regarding organization and general cohesiveness. Each mini-section bleeds to the next and as an instructor, it would be easier to be able to tell students: "Read chapter five..." for example-

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 3

I found this textbook to be very reader-friendly. However, having chapter titles would add organization. More of a conclusion would also add a lot. The textbook is divided into two main sections.

Interface rating: 5

This textbook is free of any interface issues.

I didn't notice any issues with grammar. The writing voice, though there were many contributors, reads as clear and cohesive. The textbook editors did a good job, overall.

This textbook isn't insensitive or offensive in any way. The examples used and the content of the textbook work to give readers more reach through reflective and thoughtful presentation. I liked that the book spoke to various socioeconomic readers. Writers did a good job of blending conversational voice with elevated, more professional, voice to speak and connect to different readers.

The intention behind this textbook is smart -- any instructor teaching a class about ways the student writer approaches web communication would benefit from this text.

Reviewed by Timothy R. Amidon, Assistant Professor of Digital Rhetorics, Colorado State University on 1/7/16

Writing Spaces offers a student accessible overview of writing in digital writing environments. More specifically, this textbook provides fun and easy to read introductions to concepts (e.g, fair use; accessibility; hyperlinks), genres (e.g.,... read more

Comprehensiveness rating: 5 see less

Writing Spaces offers a student accessible overview of writing in digital writing environments. More specifically, this textbook provides fun and easy to read introductions to concepts (e.g, fair use; accessibility; hyperlinks), genres (e.g., blogs; wikis; RSS; tweets), and communities (e.g., Reddit; Digg; Facebook) which inform writing in digital environments. I, especially, enjoyed the sections that covered how rhetorical choices surrounding hyperlinking, web-formatting, CRAP design principles (contrast; repetition; alignment; proximity) impact user experiences, and found the focus on both design (writing) and interactivity (reading) was well balanced. I found the discussions of how to work with the Intellectual Property of other writer/designers particularly valuable because the text contextualized source-use as an ethical-legal practice which requires agentive knowledge of how copyright, fair-use doctrine, and plagiarism impact digital writing/designing. The text concludes with a brief HTML-CSS tutorial that provides a super-friendly introduction to authoring using code--a first experience that would certainly bolster student and/or instructor confidence with HTML & CSS.

Content Accuracy rating: 5

The textbook content is timely and accurate. Students will not only benefit from the insights the editors have incorporated about how writer/design choices regarding typography, search engine optimization, accessibility, and file formatting potentially add or detract value from a webtext, but also the helpful and current resources that the editors have linked to regarding, for instance, Creative Commons, HTML5, and Google Web Fonts.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 4

Currently, the textbook is very strong in this category as it is up to date. To the degree that the textbook might be understood as a general introduction to the ways design choices impact writing in digital environments, it is likely that the book will remain relevant for a good period of time. Still, as with any textbook that deals with digital writing and communication technologies, it is likely that examples could be outdated as interfaces and practices evolve over time. The text and/or image based examples are thoughtfully selected, and the textbook is organized conceptually so it's unlikely that practices such as SEO or accessibility or hyperlinking will change generally, but it is possible that some aspects of these practices and/or the textual/image examples used to illuminate practices could become outdated. The greatest concern I have is that the valuable links to 3rd party content (e.g., WAVE, MOZ's SEO Beginner's Guide, Creative Commons) could break if/as URLs change.

This is, perhaps, one of the strongest assets of this textbook. It is super accessible and friendly to beginners and/or everyday users of the web. The voice is funny, quirky, and respectful of students. The editors/authors have even worked in pop culture references to #lolcats and politely poked fun at the uncoolness of animated GIFs.

The textbook is well organized. It begins with overviews of genres commonly found in digital environments, before turning toward the work of discussing how more specific design choices impact the rhetorical effectiveness of digital writing. Discussions of genres, communities, and practices embrace a rhetorical framework which points toward how writerly/designerly choices impact how audiences might interact with a piece of writing found in digital environments. The framework and terminology the editors have selected is consistent with the way digital rhetorics are discussed and understood in field based journals, but the concepts are discussed in ways that not overly jargony. Put simply, the editors emphasize a rhetorical approach towards discussing genres, communities, and practices found in digital writing environments, but do so in a way that would not be academically or technically disorienting toward new learner.

It seems as though modularity was central to the design of this textbook. While the textbook coherences in a linear reading, it just as readily lends itself toward being unpackaged and assigned in non-sequential ways. For example, it would make just as much sense for an instructor to exclusively assign the section that specifically deals with digital writing genres and communities, as it would to exclusively assign only the pages that deal with Twitter or the HTML-CSS tutorial.

The organization is thoughtful. As previously discussed, the book begins with an introduction to genres and communities before turning toward a more detailed overview of how specific design choices impact the rhetorical efficacy of web-based writing.

The book embraces the design the principles that it discusses. I found the interface readible, accessible, and easy to navigate.

This is a well written textbook: I found no errors of the grammar.

Cultural Relevance rating: 3

It seems unfair to poorly rate this textbook based in this category, as it's clear that the aim of this textbook is to serve as an introduction to writing in digital environments. Indeed, this is a "style guide" that introduces writer/designers toward the rhetorical impacts that their design choices might have for audiences. It may be possible that other textbooks in the "Writing Spaces" series offer greater coverage of the cultural dimensions associated with (digital) writing (e.g., E-Waste; digital divide; privacy and surveillance in digital space) so instructors looking for such content should be look toward *Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing Vol. I* or *Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing Vol. II* to see if these do, in fact, have coverage of such topics.

Textbooks like this are increasingly valuable for students because of the sharply rising costs of education. I cannot offer strong enough support for the work that the editors and contributors of this textbook undertaken through developing such a valuable learning asset. I'll be incorporating this text within my own digital writing and rhetorics courses, and I look forward to reading the other offerings in the *Writing Spaces* series. I also hope that I may contribute to this important work in the future.

Reviewed by Kris Kodrich, Associate Professor, Colorado State University on 1/7/16

A useful guide for Writing on the Web. It provides many tips for authors of websites, blogs and other materials on the Web. It is a fast-paced, easy-to-read and practical guide. While some of it is common sense, it is always good to have reminders... read more

A useful guide for Writing on the Web. It provides many tips for authors of websites, blogs and other materials on the Web. It is a fast-paced, easy-to-read and practical guide. While some of it is common sense, it is always good to have reminders on the proper way to do things on the Web. Some additional information from the research on how readers view things on websites -- eye-tracking studies, for example -- would be useful as that impacts how pages are best designed for impact and readability. And it could draw more from the literature in areas like design (for example, serif vs. sans serif fonts), rather than a reliance on opinion. More emphasis needs to be placed on matters such as accuracy, ethics, and libel. If your material is published on the Web, those concerns do matter. And that includes the material from contributors to websites, wikis or blogs. A future update could use contributions from journalists and journalism professors, who could speak on the critical importance of those issues. The book has a clear table of contents. It might provide more specific and practical style tips, such as whether it's email or e-mail, Internet or internet, etc. A quick usage guide to terms on the Internet would be a useful addition. Also, the extensive section on coding seems a bit out of place in a "writing style guide" and might be part of a separate technical book on planning, designing and building websites. Overall, this book will be useful and relevant for a wide variety of readers in different fields.

Accurate, although it could go into a few more details in certain areas. A few typos but generally well edited. More reliance on research would help make it even stronger. Also, the book could stress the importance of making sure your online work is accurate. That includes monitoring what people post on your site. Plus, saying the worst thing that can happen if you borrow/use images from other sites without permission is that you'll get a letter to stop using them is not accurate. Some media firms have sued bloggers for thousands of dollars for using copyrighted materials. While this guide does stress the importance of following copyright law, it could be emphasized even more.

The Web is clearly under constant change. But this book provides general tips that should continue to be generally applicable, and, as things change, it could be updated quickly. One area that could be much more prominent is mobile technology and mobile apps. People are rapidly moving from getting their information from desktop and laptop computers to getting almost everything from their phones and tablets. Any future updates to this guide should have an extensive section on mobile use and how to best write for those users.

This is a fun, enjoyable read. This guide flows smoothly. Some parts do need more explanation and/or examples. For example, it could explain how having comments on blogs builds ethos.

Terms are generally explained well.

The organizational structure is sound. It can be read in easily digestible nuggets.

The content flows smoothly and logically. One section leads to the next. My only recommendation would be to leave out the section on coding (not really appropriate for a Web writing style guide) and perhaps have it be part of a different book on building websites.

No issues noticed.

A few minor grammatical issues. For example, a website is an it, not a they.

No big problems noticed, but many examples are of writing teachers' online work and academic departments' websites. Future updates could include a wider variety of interesting and diverse examples. Also, the section on blogging should include more discussion of monitoring the blogs for insensitive rants and inaccurate statements. It's good to encourage feedback and comments, but some restraints are needed for legal and ethical reasons.

I enjoyed this online textbook. Overall, if you want a good introduction for students on anything from hyperlinks to plagiarism, this is a good, easy-to-read guide for them. While much of the material is common knowledge for anyone who works with websites, the guide provides useful information and good reminders. The guide is a nice primer for those who are new to the field. It has a good mix of contributors -- mainly college writing teachers. But it would benefit from other perspectives, particularly in journalism. And it needs more emphasis on the need for accuracy when you write anything that's clearly not fiction for the Web Not only is a Web writer's credibility at stake, but inaccuracies also could lead to legal ramifications.

Reviewed by Sonja Grove, EdD, Instructor, Part time, Portland Community College - Portland, Or. on 1/7/16

I downloaded this text, and was surprised it was focused upon Web writing in all genres. I was at first disappointed since I teach WR 90, and looking for a more comprehensive text on writing, but after reviewing it, I was a believer. My students... read more

I downloaded this text, and was surprised it was focused upon Web writing in all genres. I was at first disappointed since I teach WR 90, and looking for a more comprehensive text on writing, but after reviewing it, I was a believer. My students are culturally diverse, and often high poverty, so computer literacy is a high need. They can use computers, but the comprehensiveness of reviewing all aspects of web writing is a high need. I learned a lot - the kind of questions you figure a 30 something answers daily, but quite complex to me. I had heard of most of the genres, but understanding their use, and how I might use that in my class - incredibly worthwhile. Understanding the genre's purpose, and also how to improve writing in it, brilliant!

I thought it was well established information, and though the many aspects of web writing are not necessarily my expertise area, I did not see bias; I saw the goals, and strategies from an educator's point of view. That was extremely satisfying to me. I plan to use it, so that says a great deal.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 5

This area of using the web is a work in progress. It will be updated for sure, as every day there is a new communication tool to share information, thus, I feel its accuracy is excellent, but if you worked at Apple, maybe not! I thought it was very inclusive and up to date.

The writing was accessible and fun. The authors know how to work with students, that is clear. I felt it was articulately expressed, but had a casualness of language and thought that made it easy to understand. I kept seeing how students would appreciate the information and delivery, some more than others. Many students understand the genres much better than others, but the appropriateness of writing within the genres, everyone can benefit from..

I am not an expert in this area of the internet, though I am surrounded with family who are experts (a librarian/archivist at Oregon State University and a 31 year old Communications' Specialist for the Attorney General of Oregon) who have shared information with me, as I was lost in this new world of social media. I thought the language was not only accessible but definitely consistent in tone and information.

This is a strength area of this online style guide. There were headings that were short and digestible about various areas, including blogs, Reddit, Wiki, Tumblr, Twitter, etc. I felt anyone of them could be given separately - they were not dependent upon information from one to understand another. I could give this separately in writing and reading without any problem. They do and don't build upon each segment or genre.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 4

The logical order and flow were excellent. I found myself asking questions about the next area, and from my view, the organization was excellent. It flowed to the next genre, but it wasn't dependent upon the previous one. The writing is very easy to understand, so that made it easy to make sense of. The information is relevant, most of us have heard of the various genres somewhere, and that made it easier to understand. I had schema to build on the goal of the genre, but I will say as the areas got more complex and current, I found it less accessible because I had not heard of the genre (that could be my issue)!

I thought the interface was excellent except for one picture that was difficult to discern. I am surprised when I see a picture in a book, or an email for it does not translate well. The picture was distorted and I could not understand it, so that is a negative, but that was only one. Beyond that, it was easy to understand. I wonder if more examples in pictures or examples might help, but since I downloaded it, I may have missed some of that.

I am a grammar editor who can see a mistake a mile away. I did not detect any grammatical errors in the writing, and felt it was well-edited by others. The list of contributors who are English teachers is long, so it felt very well articulated in all ways. I loved the language that would meet students - casual but thoughtful and accurate.

This is an interesting area with this information. It did not try to be culturally relevant, but it was not at all insensitive. The structure was given, the ideas for best practices were within reason, but it did not lend itself to culture; however, that being said, it was not offensive or thoughtless. I might say this was pretty non-ethnocentric, and maybe it was the material that was so straightforward informationally, so not sure if I am missing something that I should have been more focused upon!

A strong focus on writing and different online genres was brilliant to me. This is done so poorly in a print book, absent from a computer, but this is accessed online and that made it so much more relevant and easy to practice or review. One could pull up the genre and practice it, or possibly it was already used by the student, and the ideas were focused for writing excellence in all genres. I learned a lot of information I have had so many questions about, so it may be more helpful for someone not a millennial, but I am sure my students who have less access to computers, and futurist educational best practices would be well served. I plan to use this, and that is the best endorsement I can give this book.

Table of Contents

  • Introduction
  • Writing in the Genres of the Web
  • The Rhetorics of Web Pages

Ancillary Material

About the book.

The Writing Spaces Web Writing Style Guide was created as a crowdsourcing project of Collaborvention 2011: A Computers and Writing Unconference. College writing teachers from around the web joined together to create this guide (see our Contributors list). The advice within it is based on contemporary theories and best practices.

While the text was originally written for students in undergraduate writing classes, it can also be a suitable resource for other writers interested in learning more about writing for the web.

This document is available as a web text for reading online, a printer-friendly PDF, and an EPUB ereader versions.

About the Contributors

Matt Barton is a professor of English at St. Cloud State University.

James Kalmbach  professor emeritus, Department of English, Illinois State University. 

Charlie Lowe is an assistant professor in the Department of Writing at Grand Valley State University where he teaches first year composition, professional writing, and web design. He is a strong advocate of open source software adoption and open access publishing.

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GatherContent is becoming Content Workflow by Bynder. Read More

Content style guide: A step-by-step guide to creating your own

web content writing style guide

Product Content Design Manager, Shopify

9 minute read.

Interviewed by:

Table of contents

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Content Delivery

How to deliver high quality website content, on time and in budget.

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Founder of Lagom Strategy

Consistency and brand messaging can suffer if documented brand guidelines aren’t in place. That is why a content style guide is an invaluable part of any organization's content operations . This step-by-step article will take you through the process of creating your own style guide template.

Easy to create and use across your organization, your style guide will:

  • Keep tone, voice, and messaging consistent
  • Guide your team on how to write for your audiences
  • Help maintain a recognized quality and brand identity
  • Lead to more compelling content and brand consistency

Why do you need a content style guide?

A content style guide is a set of content rules that keeps the tone of voice and other elements of brand voice consistent across pieces of content, regardless of who creates it. This guide covers aspects of content style such as grammar, language, formatting, and tone—all the things needed to compose and present content.

1. To put your audience first

All style guides are about communicating more effectively with your audience. Their needs, wants, and expectations shape every piece of content created. Staying in tune with their interests, behaviors, and activities dictates the language, mediums, and messaging you use.

A style guide recognizes a link between your audience's needs and the best way to fulfill those needs impactfully.

2. To maintain consistency

Giving your audience a consistent experience builds loyalty and trust . The likes of Flickr and MailChimp are excellent at keeping their tone and brand voice consistent through everything on every level, from default text to terms and conditions.

With more than one person responsible for content creation, keeping the tone of voice locked down can be challenging. A style guide is a central reference that your content creators can use to keep the overall voice consistent across your website, blog, social media, and anywhere else you show up.

3. To encourage best practices

Creating a style guide starts with research . Your audience, brand, business goals, and competitors all influence your style, and thus your style guide.

Getting as much insight as possible will help you create the most effective guide. Use what you’ve learned about your brand so far using tools like:

  • Discovery sessions
  • Stakeholder interviews
  • Content audits

All of these give you a pretty great starting point for identifying your style. Look at the bigger picture, too, and research your competitors. If they’re speaking to the same people you want to speak to, there’s a good chance you can learn something interesting from their brand voice and style.

4. To create better content

A style guide is about identifying and documenting how you communicate . As much as it is a practical resource, a style guide is also a commitment to more intentional content .

Grammar, punctuation, and formatting all contribute to the quality of your content, and a style guide keeps all this in check. Personality, trends, and brand values all come into play here, and it’s these elements that help your brand produce better content.

The Who, When, and How of a Good Content Style Guide

Now, it’s time to talk about logistics. Let’s look at who creates the content style guide, when they create it, and how.

Who creates a content style guide?

You don’t need to be a writer to create a content style guide. Typically, someone on the marketing, branding, or content teams would gather the information and create the style guide.

Here, the aim is to create a rundown of content do’s and don’ts for the whole team to follow. That’s why it’s important to consult with other departments and team members as they all have a unique insight to bring to the table.

Your brand will also probably have some sort of branding style guide or brand book. The branding style guide will include typography, color palettes, logo usage, taglines, and any other branding guidelines essential to visual branding.

This branding guide may inform the editorial style guide as branding elements play a big role in brand personality and voice. Keep this in mind as you create the content style guide.

When do you create it?

Creating a content style guide is an open-ended exercise. It grows as your understanding, clients, and business do. Why not start right now?

It’s also something you can offer to your clients as a service. Tone and voice play an important role in creating content , so use what you learn in this guide to educate your clients and help them create their own style guide. It helps you create culture-rooted content, and it helps them stay consistent in the future. Win-win!

How do you present your finalized tone of voice guidelines?

When it comes to presenting the finalized guidelines, you don’t need anything fancy. In fact, a simple word doc is fine. Remember, the guide is something that writers and marketers can quickly reference when creating content.

Try to keep your guide to 4-5 pages , as anything longer will be too meaty to digest in those quick question moments. Also, make it easily available to the entire team. We recommend uploading it to your website so that it lives on a URL that anyone can see and share.

Understand your audiences

Audiences are complex and ever-changing, just like the content itself.

You can’t start creating content until you have established who your audience is. It can be as simple as some light demographic researc h or go as deep as individual personas . It’s all up to you.

Understanding your audience is about more than objectives and actions. As you begin to research your audience, ask questions like:

  • What’s important to them?
  • What sources do they trust?
  • What values matter to them?
  • How do they speak?
  • How do your competitors tap into the same market?

Look at the bigger picture and see your audience as fully formed people, not search engine keywords. This gives your content style guide more weight and relevance.

Here’s an example of how to break down what your audience may want and need.

Example: A car seat company

Imagine you’re creating content for a car seat company website. What do you think the message, language and tone, and content should be?

  • Message: Our product is safe. Your baby will be safe. We understand that this is your baby’s safety we’re talking about.
  • Language: Simple, no jargon, and clear. Active voice.
  • Tone: Reassuring, informative, and understanding. Relatable and sincere.
  • Content: Testimonials from other mums, reviews from parenting magazines, and a video to showcase the simplicity of using the car seat.
  • Voice: Trusted experts who understand what it’s like to be a parent.

The audience, mothers, and parents, in general, are looking for:

  • Information: Clear and professional. Fact-driven and confirmed by industry bodies.
  • Reassurance: This is their child’s safety, so they need to feel an affinity and sincerity.
  • Validation: They want to know that other parents have used and trusted this product.

Although this content and tone might drift between emotional and functional, the voice remains consistent. This is what builds loyalty and trust between you and your audience. There’s no uniform way to uncover and relate to an audience. Some use team-wide insight, and others opt for online tools.

Here are some great articles to help you figure out who your audience is:

  • How to find your target audience
  • Five critical tips for identifying your target audience
  • How to define your target audience

Getting to know your brand

Before you reach out and start connecting with audiences, you first need to know your own brand inside and out.

A mistake many companies make is being too involved with their own idea of their brand. Your brand is purely based on the perceptions of your audience.

Uncovering how much you know about your brand doesn’t have to take hours of workshopping. It just takes a few simple questions:

  • What is your purpose? What do you promise your customers?
  • What makes you unique?
  • What do you stand for?
  • Who are your competitors? How do they talk and present themselves?
  • How are all the above communicated?

You’ll want to ask your entire team these questions. Inconsistent answers across your team can indicate that there isn’t a clear and cohesive brand. However, if their answers consist of the same words or ideas, then you know that everyone is on the same page.

Discovering your mission statement, values, and character all go towards creating a rounded content style guide.

Developing your voice and tone

Your voice and tone come from what your audience needs and how your brand can deliver. Let’s discuss the difference between voice and tone.

‍ Voice: A voice is consistent. It’s your style and point of view. Ultimately, voice encompasses your brand personality.

  • Are you casual or formal?
  • Do you use slang?
  • Do you have your own recognizable words like fave, totes, etc.?

Tone: Tone is specific to your messaging. It is the attitude and can change depending on the type of message conveyed.

  • Are you sarcastic?
  • Super friendly?
  • Cutely funny?

Exercise: Create your brand personality

This PDF by Big Brand System has a simple, 10-minute personality exercise . Completing this exercise will really help you understand where your brand lands on the spectrum of different personality traits.

Nailing down your brand personality is an important first step in developing an effective content style guide. Take a few minutes to do this exercise with your team.

Brand personality exercise

Developing your voice in 4 steps

Now that you have a wealth of information and insight at your fingertips, you can start to understand your brand voice.

1. Use 3 words to express your brand personality

Choose three words that capture your brand personality. At the same time, be sure to add a brief explanation of what this doesn’t mean. A word can mean something different to the next person, so by offering some context, you can combat any issues straight off the bat.

Example: Apple

Apple is renowned for its clean, simple, and inspiring content. Their list might look like this:

  • Calm, but not passive
  • Confident, but not arrogant
  • Innovative, but not flash

2. Identify what makes you stand apart

This doesn’t mean resorting to controversial content to gain attention.  What differentiates you from your competitors?

Basecamp founder Jason Fried once said, “When you write like everyone else, you’re saying, 'Our products are like everyone else’s.'” If you really want to stand out, you have to carve your own path.

Example: Old Spice

Watch the 'Your man could smell like this’ ad:

The Old Spice team achieved something pretty amazing with this witty video ad. Not only did it bring their aged identity into modern times, but it put many of the unrealistic, cinematic cologne ads to shame.

They appealed to, mocked, and humorously invited men and women to enjoy the joke—something that immediately gained them a following. This unique and refreshing brand voice stood out in a sea of other similar products.

3. Listen to your audience

If you’re trying to reach an audience, you need to uncover who they are and what makes them tick. Maybe they’re bored with their usual favorites and are looking for something new.

Pay attention. How do they communicate? Are they formal or casual? Do they have a sense of humor? Your voice should match what appeals to them most.

Example: MailChimp

MailChimp is acclaimed for its brand voice . At a time when many companies offering a similar service were heavy and uninspiring, MailChimp changed the game.

Mailchimp voice and tone

Infectious, friendly, and straightforward, Mailchimp's tone reflects their respect for their audience. They don’t talk down or dress it up. They wanted to offer audiences a more considered service that didn’t pertain to industry 'hoo-ha.'

💡 Read next: Our analysis of the MailChimp style guide to see all the things they did right.

4. Don't force 'engagement'

Engaging an audience is the next step up. Your tone should set the path , but you want them to follow it. The best way to do this? Relax.

The voices that fall flat and summon nothing from audiences are the ones that are too persistent, too forced. If you’ve invested that time into creating a tone that works for you, now it's time to enjoy it.

Express personality in the most ‘you’ way possible.

Example: Innocent Smoothies

The Innocent Big Knit is a great example of how you can engage your audience through an authentic, unique brand voice.

Innocent Big Knit ad

Innocent are the kings of humor. They saw a significant gap in the market and leaped in. With organic and health products being advertised with elitism and ‘preachiness’, Innocent took it somewhere else. They listened to their competitors, audience, and the wider community and delivered fun and a world-famous brand voice.

Their ‘Big Knit’ campaign was them all over—fun, inclusive, and enthusiastic.

💡 Remember: Not all content types call for your voice or preferred tone.

Communicating effectively means putting the message of the content first. This means you may have to stretch or adapt your voice or guidelines a little. The likes of legal content , which may need to remain intact, and terms and conditions are highly functional features. This doesn’t mean they need to be corporate and stiff.

They can and should be:

  • Plain English: Audiences still need to understand it, so try to present complicated info simply.
  • Explain jargon: If you do need to use a specific legal term, be sure to take the time to explain it in clear language.
  • Tech talk: If technical terms need to be included, break them down. Add a visual or limit the scope to make it readable.

Tumblr does this wonderfully, adding some character into their legal disclaimers:

Tumblr Terms of Service

Think bigger: It's not all about copy

A style guide isn’t just about blog posts and website copy. Any content you publish, written or otherwise, represents your brand , so it needs to be consistent with your style.

Copy isn’t always the easiest or most fitting way to communicate a message. A tool, graphic, video, or soundbite might tick the box better. Storytelling via any medium needs to stay in keeping with your content style guide.

Use video to tell a story instead

Video is the perfect medium to tell a story from a user’s POV. This is a really effective way to tell your brand story. The tone of voice and personality can be translated to screen perfectly.

Example: Lurpak

Watch Lurpak 's ‘Weave your magic’ video campaign:

In this video, they manage to encompass everything Lurpak values—mystery, quality, intimacy, and the joys of kitchen creation. This is a great example of keeping the tenets of a content style guide in place using a visual medium.

Use infographics to explain long, or complex ideas

Valuable and easy to understand , infographics are a great alternative to wordy blog posts or data-heavy articles, especially when breaking down complex concepts, processes, or ideas. The same voice, language, and grammar rules apply here.

Example: Neomam

This infographic from Neomam is a fantastic example of branded content that adheres to a consistent brand voice. Using a brand-familiar font and format, they created an interactive, quirky study that sums them up in a nutshell.

Infographic example

What to include in a content style guide

It’s time to start creating your content style guide . There’s no right or wrong way to create it , and specific additions and changes can be made at any point. After all, your comprehensive style guide should always be a work in progress.

1. External style guide

There are several established style manuals out there that can offer you a solid foundation for your style guide. Many companies or brands have one of these as a general go-to, and they are great for team-wide use.

  • Associated Press or AP Stylebook
  • The Chicago Manual of Style
  • The Yahoo! Style Guide

2. Grammar and punctuation

Your external style guide will serve as a great rule of thumb for your team. It’ll cover all your basic must-knows. Alongside this general overview, create your own tailored rundown of grammar and punctuation rules.

  • Any common issues that arise for your team? Outline them here.
  • What do you capitalize? Product names, titles, etc
  • What do you abbreviate? And what abbreviations do you use?
  • What’s your standing on the oxford comma?
  • Any common terms your team uses, like ‘web site’ or ‘website,’ etc.
  • What rules do you have on spacing?

Why not list some quick-hit questions and answers? They can act as a problem pitstop for any writers or content creators working on your content. Keep adding to the list, and be sure to adhere to your guide consistently.

3. Style and tone

You’ve already undergone pretty extensive voice and tone research. Your style guide doesn’t need to feature an essay’s worth of detail. Keep it short and snappy for the best results.

Remember to drive home the idea that voice is about how content should sound to your audience , not to you. Be sure to cover the specifics such as:

  • Should I use a passive or active voice?
  • Do I write in the first person?
  • How do you handle jargon and legal language?
  • Are there any times you would NOT follow AP style?
  • Does your writing style vary based on the type of content?

Create a refined list of 3-5 words that describe your brand voice. Alongside this list, create a ‘what we’re not’ list for context. This will be just as useful to your team as the ‘yes’ one.

Example: Straight-talking

Here’s one of the most effective voice qualities—being a straight-talker.

  • What does it mean? Clear, concise, and direct
  • What it doesn’t mean: Rude, dumbed-down, or aggressive

How do I convey straight-taking? Here are some tips and tricks:

  • Be focused and get to the point. Plan your key messages and action points before you create the content. Stick to one theme at a time.
  • Think about the audience. Is price, service, or reputation important to them? How can you be as simple as possible without losing impact?
  • Consider your content options. A straight-talking voice wouldn’t be suited to long-winded articles or hour-long seminars. Think direct and opt for short videos or snippets of copy.

And here are some tips and tricks for how not to convey straight-talking:

  • Don’t use a passive tone. Stay active and use the first person. Avoid repetition and try to keep paragraphs short and free of jargon or fluff.
  • Steer clear of cliches and overused metaphors. They will dilute your voice and could potentially make things less clear for the reader.

4. Personas

The personas in your style guide don’t need to be as detailed as those you use for other business purposes. Pull a few highlights to use as quick fix versions.

A simple collection of target audience profiles is enough to keep your team on the straight and narrow. Consider the following:

  • Who is your target audience?
  • What values do they look for? What ones can you offer them?
  • How do they prefer to interact, connect and share?
  • What are their pain points?
  • What solutions do you have for their pain points?
  • What benefits do they get from your solutions?
  • How do you tie them together for this persona?

These personas provide an overview of your audience and the questions that they might ask. This is something writers can keep in mind when creating content for your brand.

5. Content types

Content comes in all shapes and sizes, but not all are right for you or your audience. Your content style guide should take the time to outline and list what content is welcome.

This is a list that will grow and develop but be focused on your decision-making because more isn’t always better. First and foremost, keep your audience in mind.

  • Video: How-to guides, promo videos, interviews, and user POV stories
  • Audiobooks and podcasts: A weekly, collaborative newscast filled with industry-relevant chat and insight
  • Infographics and images: Promo stills, data-based infographics, and studies
  • Blog: Articles, case studies, reviews, and interview pieces

6. Formatting

Your style guide is a practical resource that your whole team will use. This formatting section will be a godsend when it comes to designing your content.

The formatting section of your style guide doesn’t need to be full of in-depth specifications. The visual protocol can be the subject of a whole separate guide, so remember to keep this light and focused.

  • How do you credit references and images? Do they appear in the copy body or footer?
  • Do you add captions to images?
  • Where on the page are images and video placed? Centre, left, wrapped?
  • What fonts and colors do you use? Is bold, underline, and italics allowed? In what context?

7. Approved and unapproved content.

‍ Research is a necessary part of the content creation process. Creating a list of recognized and valuable resources makes a writer’s life much easier. Just as with voice examples, include the ‘never mentions’ for reference, too.

‍ Approved content:

  • Industry guides
  • Specialized blogs
  • Product videos
  • Key brands/competitors
  • Market research sources
  • Data-centered reports and studies

Unapproved content:

  • Taboo competitors
  • Unreliable resources
  • Controversial or unfounded topics/opinions

Keep adding to this list with every piece of content created and published. Like the style guide itself, your understanding will continue to grow and develop.

Create your own content style guide

Now that you know how to create your own content style guide, it’s time to dive in! Your style guide will become a valued company resource that will evolve as you do.

Content isn’t just written; it’s designed. A style guide such as this empowers you to explore your brand and express your personality in new, creative ways.

Content Style Guides Checklist

A free checklist to help you plan, create, disseminate and maintain a content style guide..

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About the author

Nic is a product content strategist at Shopify who collaborates with designers, developers, researchers, and product managers to design and build Shopify's user interfaces. Previously, Nic was a freelance copywriter based in Glasgow; she believes that no matter what the medium, brief or platform, using the perfect words in the best possible way can create a story, a natural communication between people, their ideas and the rest of the world. You can follow her on Twitter .

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Guidelines for writing code examples

The guidelines described in this article apply to the styling and formatting of code examples, irrespective of the language. For guidelines about what content to include while writing the code examples, see the writing style guide .

For technology-specific guidelines, see the following articles:

  • HTML guidelines
  • CSS guidelines
  • JavaScript guidelines
  • Shell prompt guidelines

General best practices

This section provides the best practices for creating an understandable minimal code example to demonstrate the usage of a specific feature or function.

Code examples that you add to MDN Web Docs should be:

  • simple enough to be understandable, but
  • complex enough to do something interesting, and preferably useful.

There is one overarching consideration that you need to keep in mind: Readers will copy and paste the code sample into their own code and may put it into production.

Therefore, you should make sure that the code example is usable, follows generally accepted best practices, and does not do anything that will cause an application to be insecure, grossly inefficient, bloated, or inaccessible. If the code example is not runnable or production-worthy, be sure to include a warning in a code comment and in the explanatory text; for example, if it is only a snippet and not a full example, make this clear. This also means that you should provide all of the information necessary to run the example including any dependencies and setup information.

Code examples should be as self-contained and easy to understand as possible. The aim is not necessarily to produce efficient, clever code that impresses experts and has great functionality, but rather to produce reduced working examples that can be understood as quickly as possible.

Some more general best practices include:

  • The code example should be short and ideally show only the feature you are immediately interested in.
  • Only include code that is essential for the example. A large amount of non-relevant code can easily distract or confuse the reader. If you want to provide a full, more lengthy example, put it in one of our GitHub repos (or a JSBin, Codepen, or similar) and then provide the link to the full version above or below the sample.
  • Don't include unnecessary server-side code, libraries, frameworks, preprocessors, and other such dependencies. They make the code less portable and harder to run and understand. Use vanilla code where possible.
  • Don't assume readers' knowledge of any libraries, frameworks, preprocessors, or other non-native features. For example, use class names that make sense within the example rather than class names that make sense to BEM or Bootstrap users.
  • Write your code to be as clean and understandable as possible, even if it is not the most efficient way to write it.
  • Be inclusive in your code examples; consider that MDN readers come from all over the world, and are diverse in their ethnicities, religions, ages, genders, etc. Ensure text in code examples reflects that diversity and is inclusive of all people.
  • Don't use bad practices for brevity (such as presentation elements like <big> or document.write() ); do it correctly.
  • In the case of API demos, if you are using multiple APIs together, point out which APIs are included and which features come from where.

Guidelines for formatting

Opinions on correct indentation, whitespace, and line lengths have always been controversial. Discussions on these topics are a distraction from creating and maintaining content.

On MDN Web Docs, we use Prettier as a code formatter to keep the code style consistent (and to avoid off-topic discussions). You can consult our configuration file to learn about the current rules, and read the Prettier documentation .

Prettier formats all the code and keeps the style consistent. Nevertheless, there are a few additional rules that you need to follow.

These MDN Web Docs guidelines for formatting code examples are also good practices when you are coding.

Choosing a syntax language

To ensure proper formatting and syntax highlighting of code blocks, writers must specify the language of the code block they are writing in. See Example code blocks in MDN Markdown for a list of languages supported by MDN, as well as details on how to request a new language.

If the code block is pseudocode, the output of a command, or otherwise not a programming language, explicitly set the language to plain .

Warning: if the desired language is not yet supported by MDN, do not set the language of a code block to a similar language, as doing so may have unintended side effects with Prettier formatting and syntax highlighting.

Code line length

  • Code lines shouldn't be so long that they require horizontal scrolling to read.
  • As a recommended practice, keep code lines up to a maximum of 80 characters long (64 for interactive examples ).
  • Break long lines at natural breaking points for the sake of readability, but not at the expense of best practices.

For example, this is not great:

This is better, but somewhat awkward:

Even better is to use a template literal:

Code block height

Code blocks should be as long as they need to be, but no longer. Ideally, aim for something short, like 15-25 lines. If a code block is going to be a lot longer, consider just showing the most useful snippet, and link to the complete example on a GitHub repo or CodePen, say.

Inline code formatting

Use inline code syntax (`) to mark up function names, variable names, and method names. For example: "the frenchText() function".

Method names should be followed by a pair of parentheses : for example, doSomethingUseful() . The parentheses help differentiate methods from other code terms.

Guidelines for proper rendering

These guidelines should be followed to ensure that the code examples you write display properly on MDN Web Docs. You should also consider responsiveness making writing code examples so that they are also useful on mobile devices.

Size of the rendered code example

  • Set the width to 100% : The main content pane on MDN Web Docs is about 700px wide on desktop, so the embedded code examples must look OK at that width.
  • Set height below 700px : We recommend keeping this height for the rendered code example width for maximum onscreen legibility.

Color in the rendered code example

  • Use keywords for primary and other "basic" colors, for example: css color : black ; color : white ; color : red ;
  • Use rgb() for more complex colors (including semi-transparent ones): css color : rgb ( 0 0 0 / 50% ) ; color : rgb ( 248 242 230 ) ;
  • For hex colors, use the short form where relevant: css color : #058ed9 ; color : #a39a92c1 ; color : #ff0 ; color : #fbfa ; css color : #ffff00 ; color : #ffbbffaa ;

Mark rendered examples as good or bad

You'll notice on this page that the code blocks that represent good practices to follow are rendered with a green check mark in the right corner, and the code blocks that demonstrate bad practices are rendered with a white cross in a red circle.

You can follow the same style while writing code examples. You don't need to use this style everywhere — only on pages where you want to specifically call out good and bad practices in your code examples.

To get this rendering, use "code fences" to demarcate the code block, followed by the language info string. For example:

To represent the code block as a good or bad example, add example-good or example-bad after the language string, like so:

These will be rendered as:

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The Web Content Style Guide: An Essential Reference for Online Writers, Editors, and Managers

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Gerry McGovern

The Web Content Style Guide: An Essential Reference for Online Writers, Editors, and Managers Paperback – January 1, 2001

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"The first chapter alone of The Web Content Style Guide is worth the price of the book. Great ideas on writing for either traditional or web viewers. Easy to read and insightful ."

Phil Matous, CEO, Taylor Community Credit Union, Michigan, USA

" The Web Content Style Guide is a valuable resource for anyone involved in creating content for the Web."

From the Back Cover

The definitive guide to best practice in web content writing, editing, and design

A successful, high-volume website demands professional, high-standard writing, editing, and design. The Web Content Style Guide is the first book to codify the rules and standards that make for effective web writing and layout, making it an essential reference, whether you are a writer, editor, or publisher of web content.

The book gives non-technical guidance on what works and what doesn't on the web, with plenty of examples. The book's easy-access A to Z format makes it a simple-to-use reference, ideal for all those involved in web publishing, at whatever level.

From accessibility to animation, from fonts to forms, from grammar to global navigation, The Web Content Style Guide takes you through all the vital topics in a clear and concise way that will earn it a permanent place by your keyboard.

As quality becomes ever more critical in differentiating successful websites, the need for a professional approach to your content is growing. The Web Content Style Guide provides a set of standards and rules to ensure consistent quality content and a flawless service to your readers.

The book is organized into three sections:

  • writing for the reader, not for your ego
  • questioning every word and sentence: "is there a simpler way to say this?"
  • the critical importance of understanding your reader.
  • A to Z index
  • Additional material

Includes a sample style guide, list of further reading/online resources, and a quick-find index.

About the Author

Gerry mcgovern.

is a web consultant and author. He has spoken and written extensively on Internet issues over the last seven years. He is an advisory editor for The Business Database (Bloomsbury) on the subject of ecommerce and writes a column for the popular marketing website, clickz.com, on the subject of content management. He also has his own highly regarded and widely read online newsletter, New Thinking .

Previously, Gerry was founder and chief executive officer of Nua, a content management software development company.

Rob Norton is a freelance journalist in New York City. He is a contributing editor at Business 2.0 magazine, for which he writes the Leading Questions column, as well as news stories and feature articles. He also writes and publishes Net Style , a weekly online newsletter. Rob also does consulting work in journalism, publishing, website design, and information architecture. Previously Rob was Executive Editor at Fortune magazine, where he was a member of the management team that revamped Fortune in 1996. He was responsible for "First," Fortune 's innovative front of the magazine section, and directed Fortune ¿s economics coverage. Rob joined Fortune in 1984, and worked for several years in the magazine¿s Washington bureau. He has written several cover stories and dozens of feature stories, and also edited Fortune¿ s 70th anniversary issue in February, 2000.

Catherine O¿Dowd works as a web consultant with Arconics Ltd, a Dublin-based developer of web publishing and information architecture software. She has previously worked as an online editor for a number of IT companies, as well as freelancing for various print publications.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

If you're involved in managing, designing, editing, or writing for a website, The Web Content Style Guide is essential for you. It is packed with examples, and is written in a clear, concise, and friendly manner. Based on the authors' 40-plus collective years of experience in traditional publishing, and 15 in designing content-rich websites, it is always practical. It champions best practices in web content writing, layout, and design, and is not afraid to kill off a few Internet myths along the way.

  • Print length 256 pages
  • Language English
  • Publisher Ft Pr
  • Publication date January 1, 2001
  • Dimensions 6.75 x 1 x 8 inches
  • ISBN-10 0273656058
  • ISBN-13 978-0273656050
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The Amazon Book Review

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  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Ft Pr; 1st edition (January 1, 2001)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0273656058
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0273656050
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13.6 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.75 x 1 x 8 inches

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About the author

web content writing style guide

Gerry helps large organizations become more customer centric on the Web. His commercial clients include Microsoft, Cisco, NetApp, VMware, and IBM. He has also consulted with the US, UK, Dutch, Canadian, Norwegian, and Irish governments.

He is the founder and CEO of Customer Carewords, a company that has developed a set of tools and methods to help large organizations identify and optimize their customers’ top online tasks.

He has written six books on how the Web has facilitated the rise of customer power. His latest is called Transform: A rebel’s Guide for Digital Transformation. It shows that digital transformation is far more about culture change than technology change. The Irish Times described Gerry as one of five visionaries who have had a major impact on the development of the Web.

Email: [email protected]

Web: www.customercarewords.com

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Writing for the Web Basics – Writing and Editorial Style Guide

General guidance for writing content for the web on the university of maine system website.

The University of Maine System website follows the Associated Press Online Stylebook (External Site) . Because the University of Maine System is an institution of higher learning and an institution that prioritizes accessible web content, consistency and accuracy are important. Please review your web content for errors in style, spelling and grammar.

Guidelines about writing for the web can be found below.

Title your page clearly and concisely

The title of your web page will display as the first heading on your page (see: Headings and Footers ), and so it is the first thing that a website visitor will see when they come to your website. Make sure that the title of your web page accurately reflects the content on the page and is simple and easy to read. Learn how to use the Title and URL functions on our WordPress website.

Simplify your URL (Uniform Resource Locator)

The URL of your page, much like the title of your page, should be simple and easy to read. Your URL begins with the name of your website, followed by the name of your subsite, parent page and slug.

Example of subsite, parent page and slug position in a URL:

https://www.maine.edu/subsite/parent-page/slug/

So, for the webpage you are currently reading (www.maine.edu/content-management/writing-style-guide/web-writing) the subsite is “content-management,” the parent page is “writing-style-guide,” and the slug is “web-writing.”

Most users will understand where they are on your subsite by looking at the URL, so try to reduce the amount of characters and phrases expressed in your URL by simplifying it to as short as possible.

A simple URL also helps boost the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for a page. Learn more about SEO.

Write in plain language

The information you publish should work well for the people who use it, the first time they read or hear it from a screen reader. This resource has developed templates, checklists and writing guidelines to help you develop communications in plain language. The definition of “plain” depends on your intended audience; at the same time, audiences have more in common than not when it comes to their need for clear communication. Focus on short, clear sentences. Stick to words the audience knows.

Want to learn more about how to write in plain language? The Plain Language Action and Information Network (External Site) is a government resource available to help.

Use an active voice

Whenever writing for the web, it is best to try to use the active voice. Passive voice sentences use many more words, can lead to tangled prepositional phrases and can be perceived as vague or not committing to a topic.

Sentences that are written in active voice place the action on the subject of the sentence. Sentences that are written in passive voice place the reception of an action on the subject.

Examples of passive and active voice

Active voice: The Professor suggests that the students must begin their research two weeks before the paper is due.

Passive: It is suggested by the professor that the students must begin their research two weeks before the paper is due.

Passive voice: It was earlier demonstrated that poor sleep can be caused by high stress.

Passive voice: The person was scratched by the cat.

Convert sentences into active voice

Below are some tips and strategies for converting sentences from passive voice into the active voice:

  • Identify the “by” phrase (e.g. “by the cat” in the last example above). If you find one, the sentence is probably in the passive voice. Edit the sentence so that the subject buried in the “by” clause is closer to the beginning of the sentence.
  • If the subject of the sentence is not easily understood or anonymous, see if you can use a general term, such as “the study,” “researchers” or “experts.”

Support your global audience

Writing in plain language supports non-native English readers who may be translating the web page as they read. In many fields, English is the international language—and non-English speakers many times will translate your content mentally as they read. Complicated concepts should be presented in clear language. Your audience may not be familiar with the jargon of your subject matter, so convey such terms are useful in short, clear sentences. Additionally, do not assume that a user knows all of the acronyms or abbreviations within your website’s area, and so please review our style guide’s guidance on abbreviations, acronyms and shorthand .

Images with text can be a barrier for conveying information to a global audience

The below information relates to how images and alt text fit into your work on the University of Maine System website.

Tools like Google Translate (External Site) offer a good example of the overlap between accessibility and multilingual content writing for the web—avoid images with text because if an image on your website has text as part of the image, this poses a challenge for accessibility and is also not inclusive in design for users for whom English is not their first, primary or known language (translation tools cannot always “see” the text within an image to translate it for a reader).

Our recommended tactic is to provide text outside of an image in alt text and/or accompanying an image. The University of Maine System has a growing community of international community members, students and faculty, and English may not be their primary language. Ensuring they can easily translate pages when necessary is important.

Write for easy scanning

  • Keywords should go at the beginning of a sentence.
  • Bullet points are useful when there is no specific order for quick, digestible information; whereas numbered lists are useful when information must come in a specific order.
  • Frequent meaningful headings communicate structure.
  • Breaking content into short, manageable pieces makes the content more approachable.

Put information in the right order (the “if” before the “then”)

Organizing information in a logical order is universally helpful for accessibility, inclusion and even search optimization. Think about what information a reader needs to know first. Make the topic clear in the first sentence before you dive into details. When listing options, put the condition first and follow that with what happens in that situation.

Example: A student in a certain program may need to take a prerequisite course before taking an advanced course. The prerequisite course should be listed with an explanation first, instead of as an afterthought later in the content.

Write with consideration for low-bandwidth users

Maine is a very rural state, and availability of broadband outside of our campuses can be limited—even for faculty, staff and students living in our surrounding communities. It is important to consider website accessibility guidelines because these guidelines help these users as well.

For example, while a full color PDF and a flipbook-style presentation is snazzy to a visitor using broadband, a well-structured page with proper headings helps users with slow connections when images may not quickly load (or load at all).

We encourage content creators to ask “should I add this as a PDF?” even if attempting to make a PDF that is accessible. Web pages are easier to make accessible, and offer a better experience for low bandwidth users than PDFs. See our PDF guidelines for more information.

Include mobile device users when creating content for your website

Our website has a mobile-friendly responsive design, which is intended to give mobile users a good experience without the need to maintain a separate mobile version of content. When building and writing for web pages, it is important to consider how your content displays on a mobile device or tablet. Limiting the use of PDFs, limiting images with text that is unreadable when scaled down to a mobile device and limiting tables are good examples of content that can be difficult to navigate on a mobile device.

External tools such as What is My Screen Resolution (External Site) may be useful to content owners who are curious about testing their website for a mobile device while on a desktop or laptop computer browser.

Web Style Guide by Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton

Chapter 10 Editorial Style

Only connect! —E. M. Forster, Howards End

The measure of good editorial style is whether the content is useful—whether it meets clear user and business goals. Content should meet real, carefully researched user needs. Too often corporate and institutional web teams produce content designed primarily around internal goals and organization charts, forgetting that users couldn’t care less what your mission statement is, or how you are organized.

In this chapter we focus on writing style and composition best practices specifically as they apply to the web, mobile, and social media channels.

Online writing is best presented using short segments of texts written in a clear, concise style and with ample use of editorial landmarks. This style supports the scanning style used by most web users. But online prose does not have to be stripped down to a few headlines and bullet points to be effective: readers will engage directly with longer written materials that are relevant, accessible, and interesting.

Writing for engagement

Engaging content is relevant and targeted, and does not waste the users’ time or demand unnecessary effort. Start with a clear content strategy, defining what you have to say, to whom, and what questions they want answered or tasks they want to achieve (see the section on “Content Strategy” in Chapter 1, Strategy.) From there, respect your users by anticipating their questions and providing answers in a way that is conversational and interesting, and that responds to diverse ways of consuming information.

Desire lines

Desire lines are the pathways that arise from many people taking the same path, usually in opposition to built routes and pathways. These alternate routes typically cut across a space that was intentionally left untouched, like a protected green space, or they provide a more direct route than a corresponding sidewalk that has angles and bends. A desire line is a natural expression of impulse, visibly demonstrating how we prefer to navigate our environment when given the option, rather than following a predefined journey based on choices made by the designer. Understanding and embracing desire lines is an excellent means to designing spaces, products, and services that map to preferences, and that people want to use. In landscape design, one approach to a new space is to wait for the desire lines to emerge before marking the paths and pouring the concrete.

There are multiple methods for detecting desire lines in the digital landscape. One is through field studies, observing how people work with digital products to accomplish their goals. New projects can benefit greatly from field studies of comparable products, observing ways in which users who are familiar with the products follow the paths defined by the design and architecture, and where they veer off and create a more desirable path to achieving goals. Another approach is to track paths through web site content using techniques like eye-tracking and web analytics, and to adjust the content and architecture over time to map more closely to actual use patterns.

An understanding of desire lines is critical when working with content chunks because you must provide a path. One of the only benefits of long, complex documents is that all the required information is probably contained somewhere on the page. Even if it’s difficult to find, at least it’s there—somewhere. Users can make their way through the document without having their experience constrained by predefined paths and trails. But as when you wander in the woods, there’s no clear path to getting where you want to go, and it’s easy to get lost. Content chunks are much easier to use and navigate between, but the path from one to the next must be logical, direct, and clearly marked to help people reach their desired destination.

Conversation

The content on your web site is most often an answer—to a question, to a need. As Ginny Redish points out in her book Letting Go of the Words, “Every use of your web site or mobile app is a conversation started by your site visitor.” The key is to understand what the conversation is and engage with your visitors in a way that satisfies their goals. To do this, you must anticipate what questions people will have at various points as they work through your site content and features.

The first step is to make sure your information is relevant to your users. You don’t want to be a bore, droning on and on about things that are deeply meaningful to your organization but that are immaterial to your web site users, who have questions and needs they have come to you to resolve. Review your content and remove anything that has questionable value to your target audience. From the content that remains, identify conversation starters to associate with the content. What questions would someone ask that would prompt you to share the content in response? Remove anything that is tangential, and revise what remains. Then identify follow-on questions and answers, and in this way construct the nodes you need to build out to support the conversation with your users.

Content chunks

In Chapter 4, Information Architecture, we discuss the concept of content chunking, and how modular content informs the architecture and structure of a site. From a stylistic perspective, good content chunks focus on purpose and audience. In most cases, users are looking for specific information, and then are looking to move on. When content is divided into chunks, it’s easier to find. When chunks are the right size, users can get what they need without much effort.

But what makes a right-sized chunk? You don’t want to divide up content so much that users must visit multiple pages to get a complete answer and accomplish their goals. The granularity of a chunk should correspond to whatever size is required to answer the essential questions that make the content relevant to your users in the first place. Which brings us back to the conversational aspect of your content and your content strategy. Take your content strategy—defined by matching business goals with an understanding of users and their questions and “desire lines”—as a starting point. Use the content strategy as a starting point for creating coherent and comprehensive content chunks. Use the architecture of your site to create paths that map to your users’ logical paths, making it easy to move from one chunk to the next in getting all questions and needs answered.

Headings are a key component in the success of a content chunking strategy. When headings are used as hyperlinks, they are signposts marking the path from one content chunk to the next. As page and section headings, they confirm users’ arrival at the desired destination. Headings should be descriptive and clear. They should start with keywords (see “Keywords,” below) that are familiar and quickly recognizable, and should entice users to read on by speaking to the question at hand.

Keep the subject matter of each page focused, and express the subject using language that is clear and concise. This topical focus helps the reader evaluate the page content quickly and has many advantages for search engine visibility, where a clear and quickly identifiable content theme is important to search ranking.

Here we summarize best practices for web writing, drawing on several sources, including Ginny Redish’s Letting Go of the Words, Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, and the Federal Plain Language Guidelines.

  • Prefer the standard to the offbeat. With so many competing sources, a unique voice may distinguish your pages, but beware of going over the top. There is a fine line between engaging and annoying.
  • Address users directly. Use “you,” “I,” and “we” to make the information inviting and personal, and to further reinforce the conversational nature of the discourse.
  • Use active voice. Sentences that use active voice place the actor before the action, and are easier to comprehend than sentences that use passive voice. “We will mail your package on Friday,” not “Your package will be mailed on Friday.” (One trick for determining whether a sentence uses passive voice is whether it can accommodate a “by ____” at the end: “Your package will be mailed on Friday by us.”) Also, putting the actor at the beginning of a sentence conveys energy: “We sometimes fail to deliver packages on schedule,” not “There are occasional cases in which we are unable to deliver a package on schedule.”
  • Keep it short. Short sentences naturally follow from using active voice. As Strunk and White point out, “Brevity is a by-product of vigor.” Focusing on short sentences reinforces the best practice of cutting out unnecessary words. And short paragraphs are easier to read and understand, and also add white space to the page to make it more inviting.
  • Use plain language. The objective of plain language is to write clearly so that users can “find what they need, understand what they find, and use what they find to meet their needs.” Plain language does not mean dumbing down your text. It means writing clearly and conversationally so that people can understand what you are saying without needing to expend a great deal of time and energy. As Ginny Redish explains, “Write so that busy people understand what you are saying the first time they read it.”
  • Write for a global audience. Remember that you are designing documents for the World Wide Web and that your audience may not understand conventions specific to your corner of the world. For example, when including dates, use the international date format of day/month/year (14 March 2009). Spell out abbreviations that might not be familiar, such as state or province names. Also, consider that any metaphors, puns, or popular culture references that you use may make sense only in the context of your language and culture.

The “dirty dozen” unnecessarily complex words

A group of United States federal employees, the Plain Language Action and Information Network (PLAIN), created the Federal Plain Language Guidelines in the 1990s (www.plainlanguage.gov). Since that time, plain language has been written into law in the United States, where federal agencies are obligated to ensure that they follow plain language best practices for presenting information that is simple and easy to understand. Agencies can meet their obligations by following the Federal Plain Language Guidelines.

One of the guidelines is to “pick the familiar or frequently used word over the unusual or obscure.” The guidelines reference a table of “Simple Words and Phrases” that pair a complex word with its simple equivalents. Here we list what they call the “dirty dozen.”

  • addressees—you
  • assist, assistance—aid, help
  • commence—begin, start
  • implement—carry out, start
  • in accordance with—by, following, per, under
  • in order that—for, so
  • in the amount of—for
  • in the event of—if
  • it is—(omit)
  • promulgate—issue, publish
  • this activity, command—us, we
  • utilize, utilization—use

Putting content first

Make sure the text you present is of immediate value. Avoid empty chatter such as “welcome” messages from unit managers or instructions on how to use the site. Don’t use the first paragraph of each page to tell users what information they’ll find on the page. Start with the information, written in a concise and engaging style. The inverted pyramid style used in journalism works well on web pages, with the conclusion appearing at the beginning of a text. Place the important facts near the top of the first paragraph, where users can find them quickly. In crowded home pages, it’s often good practice to provide only the lead and perhaps a “teaser” sentence, with the body of the article available through a hyperlink.

Inverted pyramid

The inverted pyramid is a method for presenting information whereby the most important information, represented by the base of the pyramid, is presented first and the least important (the tip) is presented last. Information designed using this model begins with a lead that summarizes the information, followed by the body, where the information presented in the lead is elaborated on and substantiated, in descending order of importance. Thanks to its long use in journalism the inverted pyramid style has a number of well-established advantages:

  • Important information comes first, where it is more likely to be seen and remembered
  • This front-loading of content permits efficient scanning for information
  • A content-first approach benefits anyone who is working with a small “viewport,” including people using screen reader and screen magnification software and people accessing the page on a small-screen mobile device
  • The initial major facts establish a context for later secondary information
  • The structure places facts and keywords at the head of the page, where they carry more weight in search engine relevance analysis

Keywords are the words people use when they want to find content and functionality like yours. When defining keywords for your content, use the words that your site visitors use. Positioning keywords at the beginnings of sentences, headings, and links makes scanning more effective. Initial keywords also help with link and heading lists. Applications such as screen readers give users a list of links or a list of page headings. Such features are more usable when links and headings begin with keywords than when every link or heading begins with “The.”

Keywords are also important to support effective search engine results. When readers use web search engines, they generally use words or short phrases that describe what they are seeking. Along with the text of the page title, these keywords become the crucial determinants of your page’s relevance rank in the search engine’s indexes. For search engine optimization, a good keyword strategy is to make sure that key page elements are working in concert to portray the page content accurately. Ideally, there is one keyword or key phrase for your page, and it is mentioned in most or all of the following elements:

  • Major <h1>, <h2>, or <h3> headings
  • First paragraph of text
  • Inbound links to the page

One thing you should never do is pack in gratuitous repetitions of keywords or use sophomoric tricks like creating white text on a white background to hide keywords. All the major search engines know that even in well-written and edited text, keywords and phrases will make up only 5–8 percent of the number of words on the average page of text. Pages with a suspiciously high keyword rate will lose search engine ranking, and pages that use hidden word repetition tricks may be banned from mainstream search engines.

The best keyword advice for good search visibility is simple: write clear, well-edited, interesting prose, and check your page titles and the other elements mentioned above to make sure the key descriptive words or phrases are featured.

Linking meaningfully

The primary design strategy in thoughtful hypertext is to use links to reinforce your message, not to distract users or send them off chasing a minor footnote in some other web site. Most links in a web site should point to other resources within your site, pages that share the same graphic design, navigational controls, and overall content theme. Whenever possible, integrate related visual or text materials into your site so that users do not have the sense that you have dumped them outside your site’s framework. If you must send your reader away, make sure the material around the link makes it clear that the user will be leaving your web site and entering another site by following the link. Provide a description of the linked site along with the link so that users understand the relevance of the linked material.

Descriptive links

Most of your web visitors are passing through on their way to some other destination and will appreciate your efforts to make the trip as straightforward and predictable as possible, with few meaningless side trips or dead ends. Key to the success of any trip is the clarity of the signage along the way, which in the web context comes in the form of links.

Links are the signposts that help users know which route is most likely to get them to their destination. Good link text gives users a description of the page that will load, allowing them to make informed decisions about which path to take. Bad link text, such as nondescriptive “click here” links or catchy but meaningless phrases, forces the user to follow the link to learn its destination. Nondescriptive links often lead to dead ends, requiring users to retrace their steps and waste time.

When writing links, never construct a sentence around a link phrase, such as “click here for more information.” Write the sentence as you normally would, and place the link anchor on the keyword or phrase that best describes the additional content you are linking to. Bear in mind that hyperlinks aren’t just a convenience for the user; they also add semantic meaning to the page. By choosing to link a particular word or phrase, you have signaled to both users and search engines that it is potentially important as a search keyword.

  • Poor: Click here for more information on link underlines.
  • Better: Link underlines help users identify links.

Creating a style guide

Even with the best intensions and great writers, an uncoordinated content development effort will produce inconsistent and redundant content. A style guide can be a great resource for establishing and supporting style guidelines. A resource like a style guide is particularly useful in a distributed content production environment, where multiple authors across the organization are contributing content to the site. A style guide can provide guidance on many facets of the site, including:

  • Details related to editorial style, from general concepts like plain language to specifics, such as whether to use the Oxford comma.
  • Guidance on best practices, including how to write effective links and headings.
  • Specifications for terminology and usage, such as how to handle abbreviations and how to format dates and phone numbers.

Often organizational style guides and branding standards are internal documents. However, more organizations are posting style guides on public-facing web sites. The advantage of this transparency is reputational. By highlighting a high-quality and well-executed style guide, the organization shows its commitment to providing users with quality experiences. Many style guides focus on presentational and interaction styles rather than editorial style, which is a shortcoming, since content is a huge part of user experience.

See the sidebar “Favorite Style and Pattern Libraries” in Chapter 8, Graphic Design, for a selection of excellent style guides.

Composition

The look of text layout strongly affects how readers relate to written content. The contrast produced by headlines, subheads, lists, and illustrations gives users visual “entry points,” drawing their eyes down the page and into the content. Although the heading and list markup might look excessive in print form, on the web this markup has two big advantages:

  • Frequent headings and lists of items favor both scanning and methodical readers by adding visible structure to the online reading experience.
  • The added structure of heading and list markup aids in search engine optimization and online searches for content, because the additional markup provides explicit semantic emphasis, heading keywords, and context cues that listed items are strongly related to one another.

Providing visual landmarks

Users approach a web page with a quick skim in order to form an overview of the page and determine whether the information they are seeking is likely to be found there. Even methodical readers will appreciate your efforts to accommodate online reading patterns rather than forcing readers to slow down and pick their way through your pages in order to glean information. The following guidelines support both the skimming and reading behaviors of online readers.

Web page titles are designated in the HTML document <head> section with the <title> element. The title is crucial for several reasons. The title is the first thing users see and the first thing screen reader users hear. It is the text that displays in the browse history, and becomes the default text for any bookmarks the user makes to your pages. In addition, most search engines regard the page title as the primary descriptor of page content, so a descriptive title increases the chance that a page will appear as the result of a related search query.

The page title should:

  • Contain carefully chosen keywords and themes for the page
  • Form a concise, plainly worded description of the page contents

Some enterprises make it a policy to incorporate the company or organization name as the initial part of the page title. Although this practice is often useful, you should always consider the length of your page title. The page title also becomes the bookmark text, and many web browsers truncate long page titles (more than sixty-five characters, including spaces) in a way that makes them less legible. If your page title starts with a company name, the most relevant part of the page title may not be visible in a reader’s bookmark for that page. If you plan to include your organization name, have it come last. Start with the title of the page, then the section, and then the site—for example, Graduate Programs—Volunteer Opportunities—Peace Corps.

Browsing a page is easier when the text is broken into segments topped by headings that describe the subject of each segment. This often means breaking up long paragraphs, and using more subheadings than you would for print publication. Remember that in the restricted world of a laptop, tablet, or smartphone screen, a paragraph can easily fill the screen with a visually monotonous block of text.

Such editorial landmarks as titles and headings are the fundamental human interface device in web pages, just as they are in any print publication. A consistent approach to titles, headings, and subheadings in your documents will help your users navigate through a complex set of web pages. Choose an approach and stick with it throughout your site.

Headline style is bold, capitalizing the initial letters of important words:

  • Document titles
  • References to other web sites
  • Titles of documents mentioned in the text
  • Proper names, product names, trade names

Down style is also bold, but capitalizing the first word only:

  • References to other sections within the site
  • Figure titles

Like headings, lists aid scanning. They also group related items visually, quickly conveying a related set of concepts through a simple typographic device. It’s easy to tell visually whether the list is long or short; with a numbered list, users know immediately how many items are in the list. And numbered lists are particularly helpful for presenting a sequence of instructions, such as required steps to complete a task.

When lists use parallelism, applying the same structure to sentences or phrases, the items are easier to scan and comprehend.

Structural markup

HTML is a markup language that adds a layer of structural meaning to documents. It works by wrapping elements, such as titles, headings, paragraphs, lists, tables, addresses, and citations, in defining tags. The result is a machine-friendly document that can be read and interpreted by software. Tags tell software, for example, that the text from point A to point B is a heading, and the following text block is a paragraph, and so on. For example, when a web author defines a block of text as the page title, web browser software can display the page title in the browser title bar, in the browser history, and as a bookmark.

On the surface, a structured document looks no different from one that uses font size and other visual formatting to distinguish elements such as headings. Functionally, however, structure gives power and utility to the web. Take, for example, the heading of this section. <b>Structural markup</b> is visually identifiable as a heading because it is bold and sits directly above plain text. But software cannot infer that it is the primary subheading of this section because <b> means nothing more than bold. If the chapter title is marked as <h1>Structural markup</h1>, software knows that the page is about structural markup, and that in turn facilitates all kinds of functions, such as returning the page on searches for structural markup or adding the page to compilations about structural markup.

When marking up text, think about what each text element is and not what it should look like. Tag each element with the appropriate HTML structural tag, and then use CSS to manage its visual properties (see “Semantic markup” in Chapter 5).

Uniform connectedness

We use the gestalt principles of perception to decode the structure of a document visually. One task in making sense of a document is determining which elements are related and which are not. Uniform connectedness defines groups of related information, frequently using “common regions,” in which elements are grouped within a bounding box or uniform background.

Structural markup provides the means to use uniform connectedness to group elements in a nonvisual and machine-readable way. A list tag in essence draws a line around several items and asserts that they are related. The <table> tag connects data in rows and cells into a single expression of a concept. Even the <cite> tag surrounds a phrase and declares its relatedness as a book, magazine, or article title. Using uniform connectedness both on the surface in the visual design and in the structural markup in underlying page code allows both visual and nonvisual users to make sense of the structure of a document.

Presenting clear links

Embedded hypertext links pose two fundamental design problems. They disrupt the flow of content in your site by inviting the user to leave your site. They can also radically alter the context of information by dumping the users into unfamiliar territory without preamble or explanation when they follow the embedded links to new pages—particularly when those new pages are outside your site.

When placing links on the page, put only the most salient links within the body of your text, and group all minor, illustrative, parenthetic, or footnote links at the bottom of the document, where they are available but not distracting.

Underlining

Underlining is a carryover from the days of handwriting and the typewriter, when options such as bold and italics were not readily available as ways to distinguish elements such as headings and emphasized words or phrases. Typographically, underlining is undesirable, since it interferes with the legibility of letterforms. However, link underlines ensure that users who cannot see colors—users with color vision issues, and users who access the web on devices that do not display color—can distinguish links from other text. For universal usability, links must be visually identifiable with or without color. Links that display within a navigation column or button bar are clearly links and do not necessarily need underlining. However, links that appear within body text should be underlined to set them off from the surrounding text.

Visited and unvisited links

Most web sessions involve trial and error. For example, finding a phone number or a price or location may involve multiple rounds of searching and following unproductive paths. The process can become circuitous if there is no way to tell where you have already looked, with repeat visits to pages that did not prove fruitful. By providing different link colors for visited and unvisited links, you allow users to identify the paths they have already taken.

Rhetoric and web design

Rhetoric is the art and technique of persuasion, through oral, written, or visual media. The contemporary World Wide Web is a unique combination of all three media, but audience reaction to your high-tech web site is still governed by aspects of rhetoric that the Greek philosopher Aristotle identified almost twenty-four hundred years ago. In The Art of Rhetoric, Aristotle outlined three major elements of rhetorical persuasion that can easily be understood in relation to web design.

Ethos establishes the credibility of an information source. Does the speaker have the credentials and seriousness of purpose to be believed? Many otherwise distinguished and credible institutions still present a painfully amateurish web presence—government and higher education sites being especially notorious offenders—and the credibility of the host institution suffers the consequences of that poor presentation. Even small lapses can erode the ethos of a site: broken links, missing graphics, outdated content, and misspelled words all damage the overall trustworthiness of a site. Ironically, with attention to editorial detail, ethos can also be easily spoofed on the web. Many email scams depend on carefully crafted forgeries of real sites like eBay, PayPal, and personal banking sites. Beware of cheap thieves in expensive suits.

Pathos is the art of developing a positive emotional response in the viewer. Most sites don’t develop high emotional responses in users, but a well-designed home page with attractive graphics and interesting articles and links makes users more likely to explore your site. A strong appeal to pathos is central to many marketing web sites, particularly where the user’s identification with an upscale brand image is crucial.

Logos uses reason, logic, statistics, convincing examples, and depth of information to persuade an audience. A newspaper front page or home page isn’t just about packing the maximum amount of news into a given space. Over weeks, months, and years, a news source builds credibility with an audience through the sheer depth and breadth of information, carefully presented news photography, and information graphics, now augmented on the web with audiovisual media.

Review your rhetoric

Go to your home page and do your best to see the site anew, the way a stranger might, who knows you only through your web presence. Does the rhetoric of your site support or erode the user’s sense of the credibility, trustworthiness, and humanity of your enterprise?

Recommended Reading

  • Redish, G. Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content That Works, 2nd ed. Waltham, ma: Morgan Kaufmann, 2012.
  • Strunk, W., and E. B. White. The Elements of Style, 4th ed. New York: Longman, 1999.
  • Wachter-Boettcher, S. Content Everywhere: Strategy and Structure for Future-Ready Content. Brooklyn, ny: Rosenfeld, 2012.
  • Zinsser, W. On Writing Well, 30th ann. ed. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006.

Figures from Chapter 10: Editorial Style

  • How it works

web content writing style guide

How to create a content style guide

content style guide

If your content team is growing, then props! That’s a great sign that you’ve created an effective product or built a successful company. Give yourself a pat on the back for surpassing expectations and crushing your goals.

That sort of progress doesn't come without its own obstacles though. Bringing on new people means you now have more contributors creating content. The problem is that your new hires or freelancers might not be familiar with the established brand voice you use, or how to write appropriately for the different types of content you use to build your brand. 

That’s why learning how to create a content style guide is so important. Creating this document will help you transfer over all your writing knowledge to new writers in a way that helps you maintain your brand voice, no matter who’s writing your content. 

Why your brand voice matters

Your brand voice is the way you represent your company to your customers and to the whole world. It’s what differentiates you from your competition or any other brand in your space. 

You’ve likely seen examples of brands with a killer brand voice in your own life, even if you haven’t been paying close attention to them. Wendy’s Twitter account is nothing short of legendary for its social media presence. And people sign up for Buzzfeed’s email lists because their emails are consistently entertaining.

Brands like these succeed at having unique voices because they've worked hard to cultivate them and have made efforts to stay consistent. If a company didn’t bother to put together a content style to ensure consistency, it’s safe to say they wouldn’t be a great example or be recognized as a thought leader. They might actually end up leaving their audience confused about who they are. Imagine if you spoke so drastically differently to a few friends every time you saw them, never using the same words. Sometimes you sound sophisticated, and other times you drop nothing but slang. They probably wouldn’t know what to make of you, limiting how deep of a relationship they’d be willing to build with you.

content style guide

Source: Uscreen

For a business example, if a customer loves the humor and casual nature of your social media posts, how do you think they’ll react to sales emails that feel like spam, or blog posts that sound like a snobby senior thesis? That sort of disconnect not only waters down your brand consistency and lessens your customer’s trust.

So how do you make sure everything your company writes makes sense and meets the same standard?

The only way is to create a content style guide. This document gives a general overview of your brand, educates content creators on your brand’s personality, and sets strict formatting guidelines for everyone to follow. 

What is a content style guide?

A content style guide (or content marketing style guide) is a brand’s bible, the authoritative document that breaks down the different pieces and components that make up the company’s identity or brand personality. It lists all the writing guidelines, style rules, grammar rules, formatting rules, and brand voice and tone guidelines content writers must follow in the content creation process. 

What to include in your own style guide 

But enough buildup. You’re here to learn how to create a content style guide. So let’s look at the key pieces you can include:

An introduction to your company and brand story 

Sure, this is a bit of a given. At this point whoever’s working with you should already know about your company. But it’s important to cover these basics before you dive into other topics in your content style guide. 

In this section, share your company’s mission statement, a 1-2 sentence explanation of why you do what you do. 

create content style guide

Source: SimonSinek.com

This section is also a good place to talk about specific brand messaging, language, or phrases that are important to your brand, like your slogan. If there is a foundational piece of the brand or company values, you’ll need to represent that in a content style guide to make sure everyone knows and appreciates those details.

Explain on who your audience is

Buyer personas have become an invaluable piece of any marketing strategy. These help split up your diverse group of people interested in your business into smaller groups. The more that writers can understand your audience, the better they can write to appeal to them.

The more detail you can provide in your own guide, the better. It’s hard to cover every little detail sometimes, but you’ll want to at least touch on each persona that you consider an “ideal” customer. That means including information like:

  • Demographic: Provide some background information on who they are in terms of age, gender, location they live in, phase of life they’re in
  • Needs: Think about what basic needs they’re trying to fulfill when they engage with your business
  • Goals: List possible motivations - what pain they’re trying to avoid, or pleasure they’re trying to seek when they buy your product or service
  • Challenges: Share some potential hurdles they might face

As your company continues to evolve, you may target personas with unique pieces of content like a blog post or weekly newsletter, and this understanding of personas needs to be reflected in every piece of content. This is the exact reason why you want to include that information in a universal document that will be given to new team members and content collaborators — by speaking to the right audience in the right tone and overall voice, all your writers can be on the same page when representing your company.

Mention who your competitors are

You don’t need to spend too much time highlighting other organizations in your market. But drawing attention to those brands in a section of your content style guide can be a valuable resource for new contributors. It will help your content creators understand how your voice needs to be different from what else is out there. You can gather information about your competitors in a few different ways, some of the most popular are through: 

  • Keyword research : Find out your competitors’ SEO focus
  • Social listening: See how your competitors engage their audience
  • Customer surveys: Learn which competitors your customers know of

It’s also important to talk about what makes your company different. These are usually “calling cards” to include in most pieces of content, because they are the value proposition that make your company’s product stand out above the competition or any other alternative. 

By understanding who you compete with, new writers will be able to comprehend your industry as a whole, and what it is that makes your brand unique.

Talk about your standards 

Here’s the nitty-gritty part of the style guide where you get to break down all of the rules and guidelines you want your writers to follow.

This could be best practices for using things like Associated Press Style (AP style) or Chicago, or what proper nouns to use. Maybe you have a specific opinion on the Oxford comma or when to write out numbers in text.

Check out Mailchimp’s content writing style guide below as a great example.

brand voice

Source: Mailchimp's content style guide

This is also your chance to standardize some of the more subjective pieces of your brand’s voice. This could be anything from formatting expectations to preferred verbiage. Here are a few ideas for things you might want to include:

  • Baseline guide (Associated press (AP Style), Chicago, etc.)
  • Important keywords or slogans
  • Phrases/terms to avoid
  • Preferred tone (playful, sarcastic, academic, etc.)
  • Headline formatting
  • Paragraph structure/length
  • Bulleted and/or numbered list formatting
  • How to use hyphens or parentheticals
  • Image requirements (alt text, standardized sizing, etc.)
  • If and when emojis are used

If there is something that sets your brand voice apart, now’s your time to share that secret formula with people who are going to be working with you on content in this formatting section. 

Explain how to write for different mediums

Since your content creators probably work on many different types of content, you’ll want to use your style guide to be specific and explain how the writing should be different depending on the medium. For example, you might have a section that provides a style guide for website content that’s different from your rules for print content.

Doing this also allows you to provide examples for each type of content. Even if it’s just a small screenshot (or a direct link from the PDF), you’ll be able to give very clear content on what works and what doesn’t work for your brand depending on the medium. 

Remember that style guides evolve with time 

Your content style guide will be shared across the company, so it needs to be a living document — something like the U.S. Constitution, an encyclopedia, or even a Wikipedia article that can easily be updated. Your brand voice and brand style will change as your company and audience changes, and that means parts of your brand’s style guide will need to evolve too.

That’s why a centralized document matters. Sure, it’s great to have a guide to point to when someone asks for a weird edit or wants to write content that doesn’t line up with your brand voice. But having a shareable, editable style guide is a pro tip that will serve you well in the future.

With these four sections in mind, you’re ready to start creating a content style guide for your company and start shaping the future for how people will perceive your brand moving forward.

Which piece of a content style guide that we shared in this post do you think would benefit your team the most? If you don’t have an existing style guide already, how do you think a centralized “rulebook” will help you collaborate with coworkers and partners? Let us know in the comments below!

web content writing style guide

is the copywriter at Soundstripe, a company that helps businesses and creators with  royalty free music  by providing resources like  royalty free rock music .

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Home Blog SEO - Natural Search Engine Optimization Content writing: a complete guide to writing for the web in 2024

Content writing: a complete guide to writing for the web in 2024

Content writting guide. All you need to know about content writing.

  • 1.1 Write for both your readers and robots
  • 1.2 SEO content writing is the core element of your content strategy
  • 2.1 1. Define your persona
  • 2.2 2. Conduct keyword research
  • 2.3 3. Choose your content type
  • 2.4 4. Plan your structure and your sources
  • 3.1 1. Draft your initial content with ChatGPT or Bard: a new era in Web writing
  • 3.2 Best Practices for content writing with ChatGPT
  • 3.3 2) Refine Your web content writing
  • 3.4 2. Semantic fields and hooks: enrich your website content writing
  • 3.5 3. Take a well-deserved break
  • 3.6 4. Revise your content and ask for feedback
  • 4.1 1. Optimize your SEO title (a.k.a. meta title)
  • 4.2 2. Optimize your meta description
  • 4.3 3. Optimize your page’s URL
  • 4.4 4. Optimize your content (length and keyword density)
  • 4.5 5. Optimize your headings and subheadings
  • 4.6 6. Use internal linking
  • 4.8 7. Use external linking
  • 4.9 8. Optimize images
  • 4.10 9. Add structured data
  • 4.11 10. Keep featured snippets in mind
  • 5 Summary table of SEO content writing best practices
  • 6 It’s now your turn to write great SEO content!

Is your content visible on search engines? And if visible, is it engaging enough to convert your visitors into clients? If your answer to both these questions isn’t “yes”, it’s time to learn SEO content writing from a SEO agency in Montreal .

Great news, this article is just what you need 😉.

Yoda saying: a content writter pro you will become

Our complete guide to web content writing answers the following questions:

  • How to write proper web content in 2024?
  • How to target your potential customers’ needs in your content?

What is AI content writing?

  • How to write engaging, high-quality content on the internet?
  • How to optimize content to make it visible on search engines?

How to do SEO content writing?

The content writing process unfolds in three main steps:

Content-writing method

Before we dive into our guide and transform you into a content writer, let’s review the basics:

What is content writing?

Definition of content writing: web copywriting is the practice of producing content for a website. The objective is to create content that answers user's needs and is optimized for search engines.

Web copywriting, also known as SEO content writing, is all about creating effective and targeted content  based on your audience’s needs. SEO content writers optimize their texts with technical elements that make them  more visible on search engines.

Write for both your readers and robots

Meme content writter

When Google’s robots go through your website’s pages, they analyze several elements such as the keywords in your titles, paragraphs, image attributes, URL… Google tries to understand exactly what your page talks about . This way, Google knows  which search queries  should  bring your page up in the search results .

SEO content should therefore be written for humans, but also respect search engines’ ranking criteria.

SEO content writing is the core element of your content strategy

SEO content writing should be a key part of your content strategy, your SEO strategy, and more generally, your digital marketing strategy.

If you are interested in writing optimized articles for your website, take a look at our  SEO packages !

1. Preparing for SEO content writing

Explanation of the steps to follow for SEO content writing

Before thinking about search engines, algorithms, and keywords, let’s focus on the core element:  your reader .

Who are you writing for? That’s the first step of successful content writing.

1. Define your persona

To write relevant, targeted, and effective content, you must identify your target audience  or persona.

Neil Patel calls it a “customer avatar”

2⃣ Develop a customer avatar: You also need to know who your reader is, what they like, and why they’re on your site. — Neil Patel (@neilpatel) September 14, 2021

What is a persona? Your persona is a fictional representation of your ideal client. This representation is based on criteria such as your client’s industry, demographics (age, marital status, revenue), and online behavior.

Meme web content strategy

How to create your persona for SEO content writing?

personna for a SEO content strategy

Define the 5 following points:

  • Market and industry : B2B, B2C, business size, revenue, country
  • Professional role/position : Skills, status, working conditions
  • Personal background : Age, marital status, education
  • Objectives and challenges : Personal and professional, their definition of success
  • Buying process : Favorite methods of consumption, information sources

For this article, our persona’s name is Andrew. He is a  35-year-old entrepreneur in Montreal’s West Island . Andrew is a Honda Civic fan and has two kids, both in future hockey hall-of-fame (hopefully).

He wants to learn more about content writing, as he’s realized digital content marketing could help him grow his business and buy his ski house in Tremblant.

Quote from a content writter who works at Digitad "Today, you write for internet users before writing for search engines"

Today, you write for internet users before writing for search engines . This means persona definition is a critical step. The better you define your persona, the better your chances of creating relevant content, targeted to their specific needs, and with the  right tone .

2. Conduct keyword research

Now that you’re acquainted with your typical reader (Andrew), you must understand  the way he searches for information  on search engines.

A keyword study takes into account the language and location of your target audience, and aims to identify all relevant Google searches related to your products or services, along with their search volumes.

To do so, you can use tools such as Google Trends or  Google Keyword Planner . Once completed, a keyword study looks like this:

Excerpt from a Keyword study on Excel

Content writting

It’s now your turn (or your content writing agency’s turn) to  identify the most relevant keywords  for your website’s product pages or blog posts.

Analyze the user search intent

You must understand the  search intent  behind a keyword. For example:

  • The search “SEO writing Montreal” suggests the user is looking for content-writing services
  • The search “examples of content writing” suggests the user is looking for information  or tips about the discipline

Watch out  ⚠️: don’t rely only on search volume to measure a keyword’s relevance! Longer, more specific keywords (known as “long-tail” keywords) aren’t searched as frequently, but they  express a need that is more qualified  and  easier to target  in your text.

Keywords in SEO content writing

On top of that,  long-tail keywords are often less competitive  so it’s easier to rank for them!

3. Choose your content type

We mentioned product pages and blog posts in the previous step. Let’s come back to it. You can choose between two types of content for your website:

  • Blog posts: to discuss news or offer a tutorial (for example)
  • Main pages (or service pages): to showcase the products or services your business offers

Blog post examples

You’re probably more familiar with this format because you consume this type of content on a daily basis.

Here are some examples of blog article titles:

  • “10 tips to become more productive at work”
  • “The benefits of meditation for mental health”
  • “Simple daily habits to develop your creativity”
  • “10 content writing tips”

Service page examples

  • A commercial cleaning enterprise can have a service page that showcases the different types of cleaning services offered. For example: office, store, or restaurant cleanings
  • A law firm can have a service page that showcases its different practice areas. For example: commercial law, family law, property law
  • A software development enterprise can have a service page that showcases the different types of software offered. For example: mobile apps, customized software development, e-commerce solutions

4. Plan your structure and your sources

Now you know that you’re writing for Andrew, and you know what he’s interested in. To finalize your preparation for website content writing, you should  establish your text’s structure and gather reliable sources .

An essential step for EEAT

This step is more critical than ever in 2024 , with the growing importance of concepts such as EEAT SEO :

E-E-A-T definition from Google

  • Experience : prove that you have first-hand experience with the subject discussed
  • Expertise : offer superior quality content to users
  • Authority : be recognized as an established authority figure, mainly through links and mentions
  • Trust : be well-perceived by internet users (mainly through customer reviews) and offer maximum transparency on your organization, its sources, and its modes of operation

Core web vitals SEO strategy

Superior quality starts with a good structure. It will encourage  users to stay longer on the page , which is beneficial for your organic rankings.

A coherent structure to make your website content writing understandable

A coherent structure makes the text easier to read and the information easier to digest. It also  helps Google understand your content’s main points , which helps its ranking.

Structure is a  crucial element of your SEO content writing . In concrete terms, it shouldn’t look like this:

Example of content writing

You should establish a  logical structure with paragraphs and subheadings . For example, you could organize your subsections along the following lines:

  • Order of difficulty
  • Chronological order
  • Order of popularity

Don’t overlook your sources

Your sources are essential.  Relevant information on the topic you discuss probably exists somewhere. Take advantage! Make sure you use at least  one or two reliable sources (universities, governments, etc.). An article or a page that’s backed with credible sources  has more value  from both the user’s and the search engine’s perspective.

2. Time for content writing!

Web writing

That’s it, you’re ready to get started with content writing! If you’re well-prepared,  according to Yoast SEO , the actual writing process  shouldn’t take more than 20% of your time  (with 40% for preparation and 40% for optimization).

The organization of your time for web writing

1. Draft your initial content with ChatGPT or Bard: a new era in Web writing

IA content writing definition

AI content writing refers to the use of artificial intelligence algorithms to generate written content . These algorithms are trained on vast datasets, enabling them to produce text that can be coherent, contextually relevant, and sometimes even indistinguishable from human-written content.

How does It work?

AI writing tools like ChatGPT and Google Bard utilize machine learning models to understand the nuances of human language. You provide a prompt or an outline, and the AI generates text based on that input. The more specific your instructions, the more aligned the output will be with your objectives .

ChatGPT and Bard are like your tireless co-writers in the realm of web content creation . They can generate quality text at the click of a button (and for free).

Generate the perfect draft for you with AI

One of the most compelling aspects of AI content writing is its adaptability . Whether you need blog posts, product descriptions, or even technical articles, AI writing tools can be configured to meet these diverse requirements and follow your tone of voice .

Provide an overview of your article’s subject, the tone you’re aiming for, and the page where it will be featured. This helps the AI tailor the content to align with your editorial voice.

Experimentation

Don’t hesitate to play around with various styles and tones. ChatGPT is versatile enough to meet diverse requirements.

A word of caution

⚠️ Always review the generated text. It’s crucial to remember that artificial intelligence can make mistakes and disseminate incorrect information.

Best Practices for content writing with ChatGPT

Each prompt is designed to give ChatGPT all the necessary guidelines to produce content that meets your needs. Think of it as handing a recipe to a chef; the more precise you are, the better it tastes .

Web writing isn’t just about words; it’s also a technological endeavour. With tools like Google Bard and ChatGPT, you can elevate not just your efficiency but also the quality of your content . 😉

2) Refine Your web content writing

Your initial web content draft is a raw diamond. Before optimizing it for search engines, let’s carve it a bit more.

For this step, forget about search engines and  focus solely on your persona’s (a.k.a. Andrew) needs . Before you get started with your website content writing, think about the following statistics:

  • The average Internet user has an 8-second attention span . That’s  less than a goldfish  (9 seconds)

That’s right, internet users are  in a hurry ,  impatient , and  demanding : they get thousands of results for a single search. So they won’t think twice about quitting your page if they don’t like its content!

3 tips to write goldfish-friendly SEO content 🐟

To have more traffic with content writing, you need to be clear, consistent and concise

Our tip to adapt your content writing to goldfishes: the 3 Cs. To write properly for the Internet is to be:

  • Clear : straight to the point (no litotes, synecdoches or anaphoras!)
  • Consistent : one sentence, one message
  • Concise : maximum of 20 to 25 words per sentence

Use the active voice

Here’s a great tip to write clearly and be straight to the point: use the active voice and avoid the passive voice.

Passive voice: The cake was baked by Mary. Active voice: Mary baked the cake.

Illustrate your text

Another great way to maintain your reader’s attention is to include  a lot of images . People get scared when they see a giant wall of text. Images give them little resting points between  manageable chunks of text . The great content strategist Neil Patel agrees.

3⃣ Break up the text: People have short attention spans. Break it up with plenty of headers and images. — Neil Patel (@neilpatel) September 14, 2021

Adopt a style that is close to spoken language

People are in a hurry. Good content writing in 2024 should be simple and sound like spoken language .

Indeed, with the explosion of vocal search, it’s now critical to write SEO content that “speaks” to users.

Google is now able to identify the most relevant content for even the longest and most unstructured voice queries.

Writing blog posts that sound natural is critical if you want to  rank for your potential customers’ voice searches . These days, people with strong content-writing skills don’t sound like Shakespeare.

Stand out from AI content writing

The Internet is now full of well-written AI-generated content. A professional tone is not enough anymore.

Adding a touch of humor and making references to pop culture is a good way to stand out from the thousands of pieces of content published every day on the Internet.

Few tips to write the best content with IA

However, if you are going to use AI, give it a lot of instructions. AIs often have generic and bland styles of writing if you don’t give them a set of constraints.

  • Give your machine a style guide  ✅ For example: no passive voice, use bulleted lists, keep a consistent brand voice with the company website
  • Give the AI (or content assistant tool) a role  ✅ let the machine know who it should write as. For example: business owner, technical writer, experienced copywriter
  • Always specify content formats  ✅ social media posts, email newsletters, white papers, blog posts
  • Also, specify marketing goals ✅ foster customer loyalty, drive conversions, provide information, and build awareness.
  • And lastly, specify your audience ✅ your current customer base, mailing list subscribers, other professional content writers, prospective clients, the widest audience possible

This way, even if AI does a lot of work for you, you will  stand out from typical AI-generated content , which is often generic, because the humans behind the machines generally don’t add guidelines.

2. Semantic fields and hooks: enrich your website content writing

Your first draft is a rough diamond. Before we optimize it for search engines, let’s cut it a little more.

Work on your semantic field

To write quality content for the Internet is also to help Google understand your page’s content.

In your content writing,  include as many synonyms and words related to your primary keyword as possible . This will create a semantic cloud around it, like in the following example:

Semantique field digitad

For search engines, a single word can have more than one meaning. Enriching your page’s semantics will help Google  understand its context . This way, it will recommend your page to  qualified users .

In addition, a semantic field will make writing easier and getting stuck less likely.  Work on your hooks .

You want to convince Andrew to take certain actions that are valuable for you?

10 most converting words

SEO content writing is knowing how to  engage your reader . And since we like to do most of the work for you, here are the top 10 most converting words on the Internet:

  • New version
  • Improvement

Unsurprisingly, these words fit the typical Internet user we previously described very well.

Internet users want fast, easy, and free content. And most importantly, they  want their needs to be directly addressed  (hence the importance of using the word “you”).

Keep these requirements in mind in your content writing, mainly to craft your titles and your catchphrases.

3. Take a well-deserved break

It’s hard to write proper website content without taking breaks. Downtime is essential in any creative process.

Your brain is an engine. And like any engine, it can overheat (except between December and March in Canada, which would be impossible).

Before reviewing your draft, press the pause button. Come back later to edit your writing with fresh perspective .

4. Revise your content and ask for feedback

Before moving on to SEO optimization, the last step in the content writing process is to revise your work.

How? Just  carefully read your text again .

To  review your website content writing , make sure you can answer “yes” to the following questions:

  • Is my text free from speling mistakes? (oops) ✅
  • Are my persona’s needs explicitly addressed? ✅
  • Did I follow the intended structure? ✅
  • Do my paragraphs flow in a logical order? ✅
  • Did I respect the 3Cs? (tip: read it out loud!) ✅

Then, ask around for advice, ideally from a reader similar to Andrew.

You now have a fully fleshed-out content piece, ready for publication!

However, if you don’t want it buried on Google’s 1500th page (regardless of how talented of a writer you are), you may want to follow the last part of our content writing guide. These days, content writing skills are not only about writing beautiful prose. SEO expertise is often what distinguishes the specialist from the average content writer.

3. 10 best practices for optimized SEO content writing

This last step is content writing’s most technical aspect. We organized all optimization elements into only 10 best practices for SEO content writing:

10 tips for SEO web writting

  • Optimize your SEO title
  • Optimize your meta description
  • Optimize your page’s URL
  • Optimize your content (length and keyword density)
  • Optimize your headings and subheadings
  • Use internal linking
  •  Use external linking
  • Add structured data
  • Keep featured snippets in mind

1. Optimize your SEO title (a.k.a. meta title)

In SEO content writing, the SEO title is the blue title that appears in Google search results. It’s also the page name written on web browser tabs.

How to optimize a meta title?

  • Use the page’s primary keyword at the beginning
  • Craft a 7 or 8-word title (around 65 characters maximum)
  • Think of a catchphrase to get a good click rate

2. Optimize your meta description

Meta description definition

A meta description is a short description of the page’s content that appears under the SEO title in search results. It has to include  keywords the page tries to rank for  and interesting information for users.

How to optimize a meta description?

  • Use synonyms or terms within the keyword’s semantic field
  • Do not go over 155 characters, or else your description will be cut short with a “…”
  • Craft catchy phrases that include key information only

3. Optimize your page’s URL

Importance of URL in your SEO content strategy

The URL (Uniform Resource Locator, to impress your colleagues) is in your web browser’s search bar, right below the meta title that is written on the tab.

In a way, the URL is your page’s DNA. This means your organic search ranking directly depends on it!

How to optimize a URL for Search Engine Optimization?

  • Include keywords
  • Use-hyphens-to-separate-keywords
  • Avoid long URLs

4. Optimize your content (length and keyword density)

Lenght google search result

On average, the  first Google search result has 1 447 words. Does it mean your website will never reach the first position if you have around 1,000 words?

No. Content writing is not only about word count 😉

But keep in mind that according to Google,  the longer the content, the more likely it is to provide relevant information, and therefore to be well-ranked .

What is the minimal length of an SEO-optimized piece of content?

For SEO, the minimum length is 300 words .

Over 700 words, your content starts to stand out according to Google’s criteria. Beyond 1200 words, your content can be seen as a truly relevant information source. Your strategy can very well include different content formats, but remember that  long-form content works great for Google .

How to optimize an SEO content strategy?

  • Use the primary keyword at the beginning of the first paragraph
  • Keep a 1% to 2% density for your primary keyword (for example, 15 times for a 1000-word text)
  • Use at least one secondary keyword
  • Use as many words commonly associated with the keyword (semantic field) as possible

5. Optimize your headings and subheadings

In content writing, we refer to headings and subheadings as  H1, H2, H3 (up until H6) , just like in HTML.

For example, here you are in the fifth h3 of the “10 steps for optimized SEO content writing” h2.

Organizing your titles hierarchically helps Google  understand what topics are covered in your text  and what is their relative importance. Like in any text, where you could have a main section A with subsections A1, A2, and A3, then another main section B with its own subsections, etc.

You can organize your headings with your word processing software (title 1, 2, 3, etc.) or with an HTML editor (adding heading tags yourself).

How to optimize your headings for organic search?

“H1, H2 and H3 tags are like traffic signs when driving: they guide search engines by indicating the main points and organizing information in a clear and coherent way.”

–  Cassandre Albezard,  SEO Strategist at Digitad

  • Begin your H1 with the primary keyword and use only one per page ✅
  • Try to include at least two H2s per page ✅
  • Use the primary keyword in at least one of your H2s (the first one, ideally) ✅
  • Think of including secondary keywords in H2s and H3s ✅

Keep in mind that Google will consider the words in your headings to be the  most important  for your website’s organic ranking.

6. Use internal linking

In SEO content writing, internal linking is about adding links between different pages of a single website. There are  two objectives :

  • For users: make their navigation around your website’s pages easier
  • For SEO: show Google your website’s hierarchical structure

Wikipedia is a great example of extreme internal linking (the blue links):

Internal linking example

Pages on your website that get the most internal links are considered the most important by Google.

How to optimize internal linking for SEO?

  • We recommend at least 2 to 4 internal links per page
  • Do not link to “contact” or “client” pages
  • Add links to the  best-converting pages
  • Include links only if they truly add value for the reader
  • Insert links on keywords that are relevant to the page you link towards

7. Use external linking

External links redirect to another site. You create them to let your reader learn more about the things you discuss (a statistic, for example).

How to optimize external linking for SEO?

  • Include at least one external link per page
  • Make sure external links open in a new tab
  • Prioritize quality sources (renowned blogs, government websites, etc.)

8. Optimize images

Optimize HTML tags

That’s an important tip for website content writing that helps with organic ranking.

SEO optimization of your website’s images has a direct impact on your search engine ranking. For e-commerce websites, this step is critical.

3 image attributes to optimize

In the same way, you have a last name, first name, and date of birth, an image on the Internet has 3 ID elements:

  • The alt tag (text read by Google and search engines for visually impaired individuals)
  • The file name (IMG9876545)
  • The title (“our dog Toby”)

How to optimize images for SEO?

  • Upload images with a maximum size of 50 to 100 KB to keep your website fast
  • Insert your primary keyword in the alt tag and describe the image (e.g. “new roof installed by our company in Canada” for the picture of a roof)
  • Use a synonym of your primary keyword in the file name

9. Add structured data

What is structured data.

Structured data is  additional information  a content writer gives Google.

It helps Google better understand your website.

Structured data examples

For example, information such as “cooking time”, “reviews” or “calories” that you see in a Google search result for a recipe is structured data.

You can use plugins to implement structured data.

In WordPress, you can  easily set up structured data  with the “Rich Snippets” plugin. You can also manually code it into your HTML (follow the schema.org notation).

Structured data is only visible in search results.

No matter how you implement them,  structured data won’t visibly appear on your website (they;re hidden in the code). You can create them for the following elements: recipe, service, product, app, event, individual, organization, music, video, or product review…)

10. Keep featured snippets in mind

A featured snippet is an information excerpt Google pulls from a website and displays at the top of the first search results page.

Generally, they appear as paragraphs (over 80% of the time), but they can also appear as tables or lists. Here’s a featured snippet that shows up on Google when we search “who is Canada’s prime minister”.

Featured snippet example

Position 0 = more traffic

Around 50% of the time, a featured snippet gives you access to “position zero”, before both paid and organic results.

What does it mean? A  10% traffic increase !

Featured snippets appear mainly for questions, definitions, or lists (recipes, instructions, etc.). Google also uses featured snippets to answer voice searches .

To create featured snippets, Google uses your website’s content. For example, it may pull a definition you wrote.

How to optimize featured snippets for SEO?

  • To get a paragraph-type featured snippet : ask a question in an H1, H2, or H3, and limit your answer to 40-45 words
  • To get a list-type featured snippet : include the subject in an H1, H2, or H3, then write a point list or a numbered list

Wait for your page to be well-ranked before trying to get a featured snippet

Keep in mind that only pages ranked within the first 20 Google search results can get a featured snippet.

Summary table of SEO content writing best practices

It’s important to create quality content for users while keeping in mind SEO best practices.

If you want to develop your content writing skills, we have a dedicated online course. Don’t hesitate to contact us to subscribe to our content writing course in Montreal!

It’s now your turn to write great SEO content!

Meme SEO content guide

Congratulations on  finishing our SEO content writing guide ! You have now excellent writing skills and can perform an SEO content audit on your pages.

There’s no longer a reason for you not to get your business on the first page of Google ! Grab your pen or keyboard and get ready to  write your way to the top !

If you want to learn more about content writing and content performance, get in touch with our expert SEO content writers in Montreal 😍.

Web content writing FAQ

Why is content writing important.

Content writing is important for businesses, because it improves a website’s organic ranking, attracts visitors, converts them into clients, and builds loyalty 😄.

How to get started with writing SEO-optimized content?

To write content optimized for organic search, choose relevant keywords, and include them in your headings, subheadings, and text, while avoiding keyword stuffing.

How can you write an effective title for SEO?

An effective website content title should be short, clear, catchy, and make the reader want to read what’s next. It should also include your primary keyword.

You can add an emoji in your title to catch people’s attention 👀.

How to structure a blog post?

To structure your blog post, we recommend you:

  • Start with a catchy introduction
  • Break up your text into sections with headings and subheadings
  • Illustrate your content with images
  • Conclude with a summary or a call to action (CTA)

How to make your content writing clear?

To write clear content, avoid long sentences, complicated words, and unessential information. Prioritize short sentences, simple words, and relevant information.

How to avoid plagiarism in content writing?

To avoid plagiarism, accurately cite your sources, avoid copy-pasting content without authorization, and use plagiarism-detection tools to check your content’s originality.

Duplichecker is a great tool to ensure your content is 100% unique ✅

How to measure your website content’s effectiveness?

To measure your content’s effectiveness, you can use tools for traffic analysis (like Google Search Console and Google Analytics), search engine position tracking, and visitor engagement measurement. You can also run satisfaction surveys to get feedback.

What are the key elements to keep in mind when writing SEO content?

Here’s a 10-point checklist used by our agency’s content strategists

  • Target audience: who are you writing for?
  • Content’s objective: to inform, persuade, and sell
  • Content’s structure: headings, subheadings, paragraphs
  • Content’s length: must be adapted to your topic and your target audience
  • Keywords: choose keywords relevant to your topic and integrate them naturally into the content
  • Writing style and tone: adapted to your target audience and your content’s objective
  • Calls to action (CTAs): encourage your readers to take action with clear and relevant CTAs
  • Media: use images, videos or charts to make your content more attractive and engaging
  • Optimization for organic search (SEO): use SEO techniques to improve your ranking in search results
  • Revision: proofread and edit your content for spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors

What is the optimal length for a website content writing?

The optimal length for content on a web page is between 300 and 2000 words.

Avoid website content writing that is too short and offer readers too little relevant information. Content should be pertinent to your target audience, interesting, and well-structured.

Can we use artificial intelligence for a website content writing?

You can use artificial intelligence (like ChatGPT or Bard) to get help with your content writing.

This being said, for your content to be relevant and offer a great user experience (remember EEAT), IA should be seen as a tool to  support  your writing. We do not recommend trying to entirely replace content writers with ChatGPT. Always revise IA-written content to add relevant examples and adapt the tone so it better fits your audience.

We offer an online ChatGPT training course, so don’t hesitate to contact us to sign up.

What is evergreen content?

Evergreen content refers to content that remains relevant and useful over a prolonged period, rather than being tied to fleeting trends or breaking news. Not all content needs to be evergreen, as timely content can be effective at generating traffic and engagement.

However, when creating content that is intended to stand the test of time, it’s important to avoid including elements that will quickly become outdated, such as specific dates or references to current events that are unlikely to remain relevant in the future.

What is B2B content writing?

B2B content writing is the art of crafting compelling, value-driven content tailored to engage a business audience , with the aim of solving their unique challenges.

Unlike consumer-focused writing, it targets decision-makers within organizations, offering solutions that can improve their operations, reduce costs, or enhance productivity.

What is IA content writing?

AI content writing, or “Intelligent Automation” content writing, focuses on creating content that integrates seamlessly with automated systems, such as chatbots or AI-driven customer service platforms.

The goal is to provide accurate, contextually relevant information that enhances user experience while improving the quality of your text.

SEO content writing involves crafting content that not only engages the reader but also ranks well on search engines . It requires a strategic use of keywords, meta descriptions, and high-quality, relevant content that answers the user’s query comprehensively.

The aim is to attract organic traffic, provide value, and encourage user action, all while adhering to search engine guidelines .

Don’t hesitate to  contact our team  to define your SEO strategy

web content writing style guide

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web content writing style guide

Alexandre Corbasson

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Canada.ca Content Style Guide : Canada.ca design system

These are the rules to create web content that can be easily found, understood and used. They are based on writing principles and techniques that help make web content clear and adapted to the needs of all people. Use it with the Content and Information Architecture Specification when you're designing and organizing web content.

Table of contents

Recent updates, use of the style guide, related policies, standards and procedures, 1.0 writing principles for web content, 2.0 plain language, 5.0 content structure, 6.0 images and videos, web content makeovers.

Most recent updates to the guide:

  • as of January 2024, The Canadian Style and Le guide du rédacteur were archived, with their content integrated into Writing Tips Plus and the Clés de la rédaction . We’ve updated references and links in the following sections:
  • purpose section : removed references to The Canadian Style and replaced with Writing Tips Plus
  • section 4.2 Underlining, bold and italics : replaced links to archived content with links to current articles
  • resources section updated
  • in section 2.1 Start with the most important information, we've updated the inverted pyramid image . We removed most of the words from the image and worked it into the page content to make the section easier to read.
  • in section 4.4 Abbreviations and acronyms added quick reference links to help users find information related to abbreviations. This includes:
  • update to specify that abbreviations should be accompanied by their long form the first time they’re used on a page
  • new subsection Styles of address :
  • how to abbreviate, punctuate and format titles, degrees and distinctions with personal names (eg. PhD, Ph.D. Dr.).
  • styles of address and honorific titles
  • Under section 7.2 Write descriptive links, added a subsection Use parentheses for contextual information to clarify how and when to add additional information inside hyperlinks. This new section integrates the content from section 7.4, which is no longer necessary.

Update history (this list begins with changes on May 25, 2023).

This guide establishes the rules you must use to develop and edit English web content that will be published on a Government of Canada website. The rules are different from practices adapted to print to support principles related to accessibility, readability and usability.

The purpose of these rules is to make web content easy to find, easy to understand and easy to use for everyone, including people who have physical or cognitive disabilities.

The techniques described in this guide complement the rules set out in Writing Tips Plus , a searchable tool that deals with difficult points of English grammar and punctuation, as well as other English writing conventions. If there are conflicts between this guide, Writing Tips Plus or any other resource, this guide takes priority for content published online.

As web and language trends evolve, we'll update this guide to meet the changing needs of our audiences.

All departments and other portions of the federal public administration subject to the Directive on the Management of Communications must use the Canada.ca Style Guide. These organizations must follow this style guide's requirements for all public-facing websites and digital services, regardless of the technology, domain name or publishing platform used. This requirement is referenced in Appendix D: Mandatory Procedures for Social Media and Web Communications in the Directive on the Management of Communications .

Out-of-scope situations

Institutions that fall outside of the Directive on the Management of Communications do not have to follow this style guide. However, all institutions are encouraged to use it for both their internal and external web products. Following this guide's rules and techniques will make it easier for everyone to find, understand and use the government's digital content.

Content must comply with:

  • templates, content components, character limits and other requirements as described in the Canada.ca Content and Information Architecture Specification
  • Policy on Communications and Federal Identity
  • Directive on the Management of Communications
  • Standard on Web Accessibility
  • Standard on Web Interoperability
  • Standard on Optimizing Websites and Applications for Mobile Devices
  • Guidance on Publishing in the Government of Canada
  • Procedures for Publishing
  • Official Languages Act

In this section

1.1 help people complete tasks, writing for accessibility, writing for inclusivity, writing for readability, writing for specialized audiences, consider all screen sizes, 1.3 provide equivalent content in both official languages.

The rules in this guide reflect how people read and use web content.

Most people come to a government website to complete a task and expect us to provide information that will help them. Tasks can be:

  • transactional (submit a form or download a report)
  • informational (find out how to collect a benefit or find a phone number)

People trying to complete a task online usually don't read word by word. They scan quickly for words and links related to what they want to do.

Government of Canada web content must be:

  • intuitive : give people who have no previous knowledge of the topic or process just enough information to complete a task on their own
  • comprehensive : give the appropriate details to specialists who have more knowledge of a topic or process
  • targeted : present the most important information first, in a way that is tailored to the needs of the audience, instead of giving all the options and leaving people to figure out which ones apply to them
  • consistent : use a standardized approach so that people can scan content quickly and easily with a sense of confidence and trust

1.2 Consider the needs of the audience

When planning web content, consider people's needs. Make sure that the content is accessible, clear and adapted to the widest audience.

Making content accessible means a wide range of people can use it, including people with physical and cognitive disabilities (for example, reading disorders, attention deficit disorders, memory disorders).

To make your content accessible, consider how assistive technologies work and how some writing practices may impact people's ability to read or understand text. Remember to also refer to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 .

Make gender-inclusive writing your standard practice.

For more guidance on inclusive writing, see the Language Portal of Canada’s guidelines and resources:

  • Inclusive writing for English (only in English)
  • Écriture inclusive – Lignes directrices et ressources, du Bureau de la traduction (only in French)

Readability is the ease with which a person can read and understand a text. Readable content means better task completion and higher client satisfaction.

To make your content readable, consider your audience's reading level and literacy needs. Not everyone reads at the same level or understands content in the same way. Even when content is presented clearly and simply, people who have low literacy levels and other difficulties can find it hard to understand text.

According to Statistics Canada (2012) and Canadian literacy organizations, almost 50% of Canadians have literacy challenges. Research shows that people with literacy challenges:

  • spend a lot of time trying to understand words that contain more than two syllables
  • read word by word and slowly move their eyes across each line of text
  • skip over large amounts of information when it contains many multi-syllable words, uncommon terms and long sentences

Techniques for improving and measuring readability are in the section on plain language .

Sometimes, your content targets people who have in-depth knowledge of a subject.

When writing for a specialized audience, you can use terms they're familiar with, even if those terms aren't familiar to a general audience.  Include a summary in plain language for:

  • people who aren't familiar with the subject
  • specialists who might be scanning the content to decide whether it's relevant to their task

People will view your content on different sizes of screens. Phone and tablet screens display less content than desktop and laptop screens. Readers who use small screens:

  • have to go through more steps to access the same amount of information
  • rely on their short-term memory to recall information that isn't visible on the screen

Official languages requirements

According to the Official Languages Act , you must publish communications and provide services to the public in both official languages.

Government content must:

  • be professionally translated
  • reflect Canadian writing conventions in English and French
  • include fully bilingual images, multimedia files and transcripts, or contain equivalent information in both official languages

Persons responsible for official languages

The person responsible for official languages in your institution can help answer questions about your obligations and about exceptions.

Your communications team can help determine whether it's appropriate to communicate with audiences in other languages, in addition to Canada's official languages.

2.1 Start with the most important information

2.2 use simple and common words, active or passive voice, positive or negative form, 2.4 use verbs instead of nouns formed from verbs, 2.5 avoid jargon, idioms and expressions, 2.6 use simple sentences, 2.7 use short sentences and paragraphs, 2.8 explain references to legislation, use a readability tool, follow the reading level requirements, verify whether the content is easy to understand, plain language requirements.

The use of plain language is a requirement of the Directive on the Management of Communications .

Writing in plain language doesn't mean over-simplifying or leaving out critical information. Using plain language actually makes critical information accessible and readable for everyone.

By writing plainly and simply, you:

  • increase the chances that people will find, read and understand your information from any device
  • make your information more accessible to people with disabilities
  • allow people who are reading your information on a small screen to see essential information first
  • save resources when editing and translating your text
  • improve task completion and cuts costs by, for example, reducing enquiries

Start your content with the most important information first. Be direct. People tend to scan pages from the top left hand corner across to the right. As people move down the page, they scan less and less to the right.

Organize your content using an inverted pyramid structure to:

  • guide your audience to the information they need to complete their task
  • place supporting and relevant details toward the end of the text

Upside-down pyramid showing how to start a web page with key information first.

Figure 1: inverted pyramid for ordering content on a web page

The inverted pyramid for ordering content on a web page in Figure 1 is divided into four sections. The most important content for task completion is at the top, the widest part of the pyramid. The relevance of content for task completion flows down the inverted pyramid toward the peak at the bottom.

  • start with the most important idea, step or information
  • add details and tasks in order of importance
  • keep all task-related content in the centre of the page
  • use links to direct people to key information and tasks
  • include information for audiences who want to learn more or have more knowledge of the topic or service, but only if it makes sense
  • add links only if they relate to content that supports completion of the task on the web page (for example, laws or publications)

Get to the point

Write direct statements that relate to completing a task. Don’t distract people with superfluous content, such as background information or welcome messages.

Example of direct statements

Write : Present your passport to the border officer. Instead of : According to Canadian legislation, you're required to present your passport to the agent who will welcome you into the country.

See how the rule for the inverted pyramid structure applies in French

  • 2.1 Commencer par les renseignements les plus importants

Replace long words with short, simple and everyday words that most people understand and use. Simple words have 2 syllables or less. They're easier to scan than long, complex words.

Example of simple and common words

Write : ask Instead of : make a request

Write : you must Instead of : you shall

Write : to Instead of : in order to

Write : before Instead of : prior to

Write : get Instead of : obtain

See how the rule for using simple and common words applies to content in French

  • 2.2 Utiliser des mots simples et courants

2.3 Use active voice and positive form

Whenever possible use the:

  • active voice instead of the passive voice
  • positive form instead of the negative form

In an active sentence, the subject does the action. The sentence is clear and direct.

In a passive sentence, it may not be clear who or what is doing the action.

Example of passive and active sentences

Active : We may ask you to provide proof of citizenship. Passive : You may be asked to provide proof of citizenship.

Whenever possible, tell people what they may or must do instead of what they may not or must not do. Avoid negatives, double negatives and exceptions to exceptions.

Examples of positive and negative sentences

Positive : You're entitled to part of the deduction. Negative : You're not entitled to the entire deduction.

Positive : The procedure will be effective. Double negative : The procedure will not be ineffective.

Positive : You may claim a child born in 1972 or earlier as a dependent, if he or she has a mental or physical disability. Double negative : You may not claim anything for a dependent child born in 1972 or earlier, unless the child has a mental or physical disability.

If something has serious consequences, you can use the negative form to explain that something isn't possible or should not be done.

Examples of using the negative form for something that has serious consequences

Write : Do  not  try to locate the source of carbon monoxide. Leave your home immediately and move to fresh air.

See how the rule for active voice and positive form applies to content in French

  • 2.3 Utiliser la voix active et la forme positive

Avoid using nouns that are formed from verbs. They can be vague. Verbs alone clearly express the action needed.

Examples of the use of verbs instead of nouns

Write : apply Instead of : submit your application

Write : consider Instead of : take into consideration

Write : modify Instead of : make a modification

Write : needs Instead of : is in need of

Always use the simplest form of a verb. When possible, use the present tense.

See how the rule for using verbs instead of nouns formed from verbs applies in French

  • 2.4 Utiliser des verbes plutôt que des noms formés à partir de verbes

Where possible, avoid using jargon, idioms and expressions. Use the clearest, most popular term for your audience.

Legal and technical terms and "government-speak" confuse most people.

People who don't speak English or French might use online tools to translate text. These tools don't always translate idioms and expressions accurately.

Examples of jargon, idioms and expressions

Jargon : bench warrant (an order by a judge to arrest someone who didn't show up in court or comply with certain conditions)

Idiom : to hire a helping hand (meaning to hire an employee)

Expression : attack your least favourite task first (meaning do your least favourite task first)

If you must include jargon familiar to your target audience, be sure to:

  • explain it using simple, familiar words or give an example to help non-specialists understand
  • never use jargon to explain jargon

Examples of statements that avoid the use of jargon

Write : You have to file your income tax return (T1) by April 30. Instead of : You have to file your T1 return by April 30.

Write : Learn about savings plans that can help you save enough money to retire. Instead of : Learn about different types of savings plans that will let you build up your retirement nest egg.

Identify keywords your audience is using to find your content

Tools you can use to see which search terms are most popular:

  • Google Trends
  • Google Keyword Planner
  • Bing Keyword Research
  • Mozilla Firefox's Keywords Everywhere 

Refer to your analytics to find out which search terms your audience uses to find related content.

See how the rule for jargon, idioms and expressions applies to content in French

  • 2.5 Éviter le jargon et les expressions familières ou imagées

Keep sentence structure simple by putting the subject and the verb at the beginning of the sentence and by using the subject + verb + object construction. This structure helps the reader understand what the subject of the sentence is doing by placing the subject first, followed by the verb.

Avoid complex and compound sentences. They generally contain too much information for people to understand when they're scanning.

Examples of simple sentences

Write : Learn about Canada's transportation system. Find information about using paved roads, bike trails, airports and ports across the country. Instead of : Canada's vast transportation system enables millions of people each year to travel throughout the country, around the world, and to work and back. From this page you can access a wealth of transportation information related to travelling and commuting.

Replace complex sentence structures with direct statements.

Examples of direct statements

Write : You have until April 30 to file your tax return. Instead of : The period of time that you have to file your tax return ends on April 30.

Replace noun strings (a series of 2 or more nouns used to name something) with direct statements.

Examples of statements that avoid chains of nouns

Write : The evaluation team will submit its final report on the training program in September. Instead of : The training program evaluation team will submit its final report in September.

Surround a long sentence with shorter ones because it helps people understand the long sentence.

See how the rule for using simple sentences applies in French

  • 2.6 Utiliser des phrases simples

Be concise. Use as few words as possible to express an idea. By being concise, you'll help everyone, even specialists, complete the task they set out to do.

Keep sentences and paragraphs short to make them easier to scan on any screen size. People who have learning disabilities may find it difficult to scan and understand long sentences and paragraphs.

Try to keep sentences under 20 words. You can do this by: 

  • breaking long sentences into shorter ones
  • limiting each sentence to 1 idea
  • removing unnecessary words

Examples of shortened sentences

Write : We received your request for funding and approved it. Instead of : We received your request for funding, which we've thoroughly reviewed and approved in a timely manner.

Write : We'll consider any type of investment. Instead of : Any type of investment will be taken into consideration.

Try to keep paragraphs to 3 sentences. You can do this by:

  • developing 1 main idea per paragraph
  • presenting a series of more than 2 ideas or words as a vertical list
  • using a short form for a long title instead of repeating it

See how the rule for using short sentences and paragraphs applies in French

  • 2.7 Utiliser des phrases et des paragraphes courts

When explaining a requirement that comes from an act or regulation, avoid mentioning the act or regulation by name. Include only the information people need to complete the task.

If you must include the name of the act or regulation, always give a plain-language description. First, explain what your audience needs to know and why they need to know more about the act or regulation. Then, you may add the reference to the act or regulation.

Examples of references to legislation

Write : You can apply for your child to become a Canadian citizen after they arrive in Canada as a permanent resident.

Related links

  • Citizenship Act , section 5.1

Instead of : After your child arrives in Canada as a permanent resident, you can apply for citizenship on the child's behalf under section 5.1 of the Citizenship Act .

See how the rule for explaining references to legislation applies in French

  • 2.8 Expliquer les références aux lois

2.9 Check the reading level of the content

Check the reading level of your text. Make sure that it meets the reading level you're targeting based on the literacy needs of your audience. Do this every so often while you're writing content. You can use various tools to do this.

Readability tools help you check if content is too wordy or complex. Writing content at a reading level above grade 8 can make it difficult for many people to understand or complete their task.

You can use a readability tool like Flesch-Kincaid to check the reading level of your English content. This tool is available as part of Microsoft Word. It generally reflects the years of education needed to understand the text.

To use Flesch-Kincaid:

  • in Word 2010 and later, click the File tab, and then click Options
  • click Proofing
  • under When correcting spelling and grammar in Word , make sure the Check grammar with spelling check box is selected
  • select Show readability statistics  

You can check the reading level of a whole page or just part of a page. To check the reading level:

  • accept any tracked changes
  • place periods at the end of any bulleted items and headings (remove the periods before publishing)
  • highlight the text in your Word document
  • click the Review tab
  • click Spelling & Grammar
  • when Word has finished checking the text, it will ask whether you want to check the rest of the content

If your text contains technical terms that consist of long, multi-syllable words that you need to use for your specialized audience, remove these terms before you test the content for readability to see whether the surrounding text can be simplified. Reinsert the technical terms once you've simplified the surrounding text.

The Readability Statistics dialog box will appear and show the Flesch-Kincaid grade level.

Screen capture of a readability statistics dialog box in Microsoft Word. Text version below:

A screen capture of Microsoft Word's readability statistics dialog box shows that a sample of text got a Flesch-Kincaid reading level of 5.8.

In newer versions of Microsoft Word, search for "Flesch-Kincaid" using the help feature.

Evaluate the reading level of content as follows for:

  • navigation content (home, theme and topic pages), aim for no higher than grade 8
  • all other content intended for general audiences, aim for grade 8 or lower
  • content intended for experts, determine the appropriate grade level and apply it across all content for this audience

Readability tools reveal the reading level of your content, but they can't tell you whether it makes sense.

To check whether your content is easy to read and understand, test it:

  • ask colleagues who aren't familiar with the subject to review the text for clarity and logic
  • work with your communications team to set up usability testing for your content

If your content has a high reading level, or if usability testing shows low task completion, try to:

  • shorten words, sentences or paragraphs, but keep words of 3 or more syllables if they're well known
  • replace technical jargon with terms that people will understand
  • remove details that people don't need to complete the task
  • replace secondary references to a program with "program" rather than using its full name or abbreviation
  • create numbered or bulleted lists for key tasks

See how the rule for measuring content for readability applies in French

  • 2.9 Vérifier la lisibilité de votre contenu

Address the person in page titles, links and navigation labels

Don't use the first person, third parties, 3.3 expressing an obligation or a recommendation.

The tone of the government's web content should be:

  • informative
  • conversational
  • professional

Write as if you were talking to your audience in person, but with the authority of an institution that provides information as part of its mandate.

3.1 Write directly to the person

Use an informal tone, and speak directly to people by using the second person ("you," "your").

Examples of statements that use the second person

  • Send your application to…
  • To get this benefit you must…

For page titles, links and navigation labels, use the possessive adjective "your" when the audience might consider the item being referred to as belonging to them.

Examples of navigation labels that address the person

  • Change your address
  • Replace your card

If the subject of the title, link or label refers to general information, use the indefinite article ("a" or "an") or no article at all.

Examples of navigation labels that don't use a possessive adjective

  • Start a new business
  • Pay application fees

Don't switch from speaking to people to speaking on their behalf. Don't use "I" or "my" statements.

Example of statements that don't use "I" or "my"

  • How to renew your passport
  • Renew your passport

Instead of : How do I renew my passport?

You may use "my" in content, page titles and links for proper names (such as My Service Canada Account).

See how the rule for writing directly to the audience applies in French

  • 3.1 Écrire directement à la personne

3.2 Use "we" to refer to the Government of Canada

We generally provide information to people from the perspective of the government as a whole rather than from a specific institution.

Use "we" and "our" when writing on behalf of the Government of Canada.

Examples of statements that use "we" or "our" to refer to the Government of Canada

Write : If you started a new claim within the last 52 weeks and there are still weeks payable on that claim, we will automatically renew your existing claim. Instead of : If you started a new claim within the last 52 weeks and there are still weeks payable on that claim, Service Canada will automatically renew your existing claim.

Use "Government of Canada" when:

  • describing Canada's stance on a topic relative to another named jurisdiction (country, province, territory city, etc.)
  • explaining Canada's role with respect to a topic or issue

Use the name of a specific institution in situations when the:

  • institution will be contacting the person
  • person needs to contact the institution by phone, mail or online process
  • role of the institution in a process is relevant to the task

Examples of statements that refer to specific institutions

  • The Canada Revenue Agency will inform you if you have to repay benefits.
  • The Canadian Food Inspection Agency gives permits for some meat products.
  • All restricted or controlled drugs need an import permit from Health Canada.

Don't include references to your website on your website.

Example of a statement that doesn't refer to Canada.ca on the Canada.ca site

Write : Determine whether you're eligible . Instead of : Get more information about eligibility on the Canada.ca website .

Don't provide information on behalf of another organization. Don't duplicate information provided on another organization's website. Instead, direct people to that website to get the information.

Name the other organization when your content refers to it.

Example of a reference to a third party

Write : If you plan to travel to or transit through the United States , find out about the rules you need to follow from U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Instead of : If you plan to travel to or transit through the U.S., CBSA encourages you to visit the U.S. Customs and Border Protection website for information on the U.S. Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, and the requirements for entering or returning to the U.S.

See how the rule for referring to the Government of Canada applies in French

  • 3.2 Utiliser le pronom « nous » pour désigner le gouvernement du Canada

As a government organization, we often publish rules, information and instructions that are set out in law. We also provide advice on how to follow them.

Express an obligation

When telling people about:

  • what the law requires them to do, use "must" instead of "legally required to" or similar language
  • an administrative requirement, use "need to"

Example of statements that express legal and administrative requirements

Legal : To be eligible for compassionate care benefits, you must be able to show that… Administrative : After you apply online, you'll need to provide us with the following documents before we can finalize your claim.

Express a recommendation

When telling people that they're allowed to perform an action:

  • do use "may" or "might" (expresses permission or a possibility)
  • don't use "can" or "could" (expresses ability)

See how the rule for expressing an obligation or a recommendation applies in French

  • 3.3 Exprimer une obligation ou une recommandation

Titles, headings and subheadings

Hyphen and dashes, 4.2 underlining, bold and italics, 4.3 symbols, latin abbreviations, styles of address: how to abbreviate and punctuate titles with personal names, 4.5 contractions, 4.6 numbers, 4.9 phone numbers, 4.10 addresses, 4.11 words and expressions in transition.

On the web, less is more. Keep style and punctuation simple. Formatting (such as bold, italics and underlining) and complex punctuation can be distracting and make reading difficult for many people.

4.1 Capitalization and punctuation

Use these styles for capitalization and punctuation of content in text, links and applications.

Capitalize the main words of:

  • titles of official publications (such as reports, frameworks, strategies and plans)
  • institution names
  • program names
  • titles of policy instruments
  • titles of legislation (in other words, acts and regulations)
  • Government of Canada

Lowercase the short form of proper names.

Example of proper names and their short forms

Full names : Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Canada Pension Plan, the Public Service of Canada Short form : the department, the plan, the public service

Don't capitalize all the letters in a word.

  • Abbreviations (although avoid them unless they're necessary)
  • Military exercise or operation names (for example, Operation PROVISION)
  • Capitalize the first letter of the first word (sentence case) of all page titles, headings, subheadings, table captions and table headers
  • Capitalize proper nouns in page titles, headings and subheadings
  • Don't use punctuation at the end of page titles, headings and subheadings
  • You may use punctuation at the end of page titles, headings and subheadings for campaign slogans
  • Only use question marks when asking for information in a form, wizard, survey or quiz

Example of question marks being used in forms, wizards, surveys or quizzes

A web page containing a heading with a question mark. Text version below:

A web page containing a heading with a question mark.

  • Find out if you need to charge GST/HST
  • Answer a few questions to find out if you need to charge or collect the tax and register to get a GST/HST account number. Businesses with lower revenue and those that deal in certain goods and services might not need to charge tax.
  • Do you or your organization already have a GST/HST account?
  • Avoid having more than 1 sentence in a single list item
  • Don't end the list items with any punctuation

When list items are grammatically independent of each other or follow a heading, capitalize the first letter of each list item.

Example of punctuation in independent list items

Most requested

  • Financing your new business
  • Financing for innovation
  • Find a loan for your small business
  • Canada job grants for employers

When the meaning of list items depends on a lead-in phrase, don't capitalize the first letter of each unless it's a proper name.

Example of punctuation in interdependent list items preceded by a colon

Representatives can be:

  • citizenship or immigration consultants
  • other representatives

Use lower case for a link in a sentence, unless the link contains a proper name.

Remove unnecessary commas to make web content easier to read:

  • avoid multiple commas in a sentence by breaking it up into a few shorter sentences
  • place a comma before "and" and "or" only if it will help people understand a list of items in a sentence

Hyphens and dashes have different uses. They aren't interchangeable. Avoid using dashes:

  • use a hyphen (-) to join words together
  • use "to" instead of the en dash (–) in a span or range of numbers, dates or time
  • use a comma (,) to emphasize or frame an idea instead of an em dash (—)
  • simplify your sentence instead of using em dashes

See how the rule for capitalization and punctuation applies in French

  • 4.1 Majuscules et ponctuation

Formatting must support the most important information on the page.

Don't combine styles, like underlining and bold formatting, unless it's part of the hyperlinked text found on a topic page.

Underlining

Use underlining for links only.

Use bold for emphasis, but use it sparingly: the more you use it, the less effective it is.

People with dyslexia or other reading disorders may find it difficult to read italicized text.

Don't use italics:

  • for design or decorative purposes
  • to emphasize a word or phrase (use bold sparingly instead)
  • for long passages of text, such as quotations
  • in page titles

Follow Writing Tips Plus rules for applying italics for the following:

  • italics: French and foreign words
  • italics: legal references
  • italics: mathematical and scientific material
  • italics: titles of works
  • Latin terms and abbreviations

See how the rule for bold, italics and underlining applies in French

  • 4.2 Soulignement, caractères gras et italique

Some symbols make web content more difficult to read while others improve readability. Research whether they're understood by a wide audience before using them.

  • Spell out the word "and" instead of using an ampersand (&)
  • R&D (research and development)
  • O&M (operating and maintenance)
  • 20% (not 20 percent)
  • A quarter or one quarter (not ¼)
  • Half (not ½)
  • $100 per month

See how the rule for symbols applies to content in French

  • 4.3 Symboles

4.4 Abbreviations and acronyms

Abbreviations are shortened forms of full terms. Both acronyms and initialisms are types of abbreviations. They are formed from the first letters of a group of words, without spaces.

Write out the long form of the term with the abbreviated form in parentheses at first mention. For example:

  • Canadian Space Agency (CSA)
  • Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART)
  • Ontario (Ont.)

Use the abbreviation without its long form once it’s been introduced.

Research common keywords

Check your analytics to find out what keywords your audiences are using to find your content.

If you have to use a multi-word term more than once on a web page, use the full term the first time you use it. For any further uses of the term use a short form such as "the program" or "the plan," in lower case instead of repeating the full term or using an abbreviation.

Example of statements that avoid the use of abbreviations and acronyms

Write : There are 15 client contact centres across Canada. Instead of : There are 15 CCCs across Canada.

Write : The act strengthens the Government of Canada's commitment to… Instead of : The EEA strengthens the Government of Canada's commitment to…

Include abbreviations that your audience uses in your metadata (for example, in the description field) to help search engines find your page more easily.

Avoid abbreviations and acronyms by rethinking the content

If your content contains a lot of abbreviations and acronyms, rethink its structure. Consider placing related content under distinct headings and sections.

For example, when introducing legal requirements, use the title of the act once, if necessary, and then talk about what people "must" do. The context will make it clear that the things they "must" do are requirements under the act. Don't use the abbreviation for the act, because it makes the text harder to follow.

Close the topic before referring to other obligations under different legislation.

Avoid using e.g. and i.e. Use clearer alternatives instead, for example:

Write : for example, such as, or like Instead of : e.g.

Write : that is, in other words Instead of : i.e.

You may use these abbreviations when space is limited, for example, in a table or a figure.

Follow the Writing Tips Plus rules:

  • abbreviations: titles with personal names (abbreviations for non-military titles preceding or following personal names)
  • doctors when using PhD, Ph.D., Dr.
  • abbreviations: degrees and distinctions
  • styles of address: how to use formal and honorific titles to address individuals respectfully, both in writing and in conversation.

See how the rule for abbreviations and acronyms applies in French

  • 4.4 Abréviations, acronymes et référence

Use contractions that people use when they speak. They're easier to scan than the full form.

Use most positive contractions of auxiliary verbs. For example:

  • you've (you have), you're (you are), you'll (you will) or you'd (you would)
  • we've (we have), we're (we are), we'll (we will) or we'd (we would)

Use some negative contractions of auxiliary verbs. For example:

  • can't (cannot)
  • don't (do not) or didn't (did not)
  • won't (will not)
  • isn't (is not)
  • weren't (were not) or wasn't (was not)
  • aren't (are not)

Use, but don't confuse:

  • its (possessive) and it's (it is)
  • they're (they are) and their (possessive)

Uncommon or more complex contractions can be harder for people with low literacy skills to understand.

  • should've (should have) or could've (could have)
  • shouldn't (should not), couldn't (could not) or wouldn't (would not)
  • mightn't (might not)
  • mustn't (must not)
  • it'll (it will)

Negative contractions: exceptions

Don't use contractions when there is a critical difference between two things, for example, between doing and not doing something.

Example of statements showing differences that are critical and not critical

Critical : Do not drive while taking this medicine. Not critical : Most people don't have reactions to the flu vaccine.

See how the rule for contractions applies in French

  • 4.5 Forme contractée
  • proper names (First Baptist Church)
  • titles (Three Men in a Boat)
  • figurative expressions (one day, things will be better)
  • Keep Roman numerals when used in proper names ( Canada Gazette , Part II)
  • Place a non-breaking space (Ctrl+Shift+Spacebar) between all numeral and word combinations ($5 million, 20 years)
  • Write first, second, third, and so on, up to and including ninth
  • Use the ordinal indicator in the same text size (not in superscript) for numbers 10 and above (10th, 50th, 150th)
  • Use "to" instead of an en dash in number ranges (for example, $4,000 to $10,000, 4 to 10 years)
  • Adults aged 30 or more
  • People 30 to 65 years old
  • A 10-year-old child

See how the rule for numbers applies in French

  • 4.6 Nombres
  • Write dates without an ordinal indicator ("st," "nd," "rd," "th")

Write : July 31, 2016, or just July 31 if the year is already clear Instead of : July 31st, 2016, or July 31st

  • Use non-breaking spaces between the month and the day
  • write yyyy-mm-dd
  • explain the format in surrounding text (for example, notes, legends)
  • Capitalize the first letter of the month (for example, January, February, March)
  • Abbreviate month names when space is limited (for example, Jan, Feb, Mar)

Date ranges

  • calendar year 2014
  • Monday to Friday
  • March 29 to April 4
  • fiscal year 2015 to 2016
  • January to March 2016 (instead of Q1, Q2, Q3 or Q4)
  • This report covers the 2015 to 2016 fiscal year. A fiscal year runs from April 1 to March 31.

See how the rule for dates applies in French

  • 4:30 pm
  • 9 am to 5 pm

See how the rule for times applies in French

Use non-breaking hyphens (Ctrl+Shift+Hyphen) in phone numbers. For example:

  • if you need help, call 1-800-622-6232
  • 613-999-9900 ext. 123

See how the rule for phone numbers applies in French

  • 4.9 Numéros de téléphone

Mailing addresses

  • Abbreviate street types, street direction and province or territory
  • Use the correct abbreviations for provinces and territories
  • Insert 2 spaces between the province or territory abbreviation and the postal code
  • Use uppercase to write the letters in the postal code
  • Don't use punctuation except for a hyphen between the unit designator and the civic number

[Organization name or person name] [Additional delivery information] [Suite or office]-[Civic number] [Street name] [Abbreviated street type] [Abbreviated street direction] [City] [Two-letter province or territory abbreviation] [Postal code]

Example of a mailing address.

Integrity Regime Departmental Oversight Branch Public Services and Procurement Canada Portage III Tower A 10A1 105-11 Laurier St Gatineau QC  K1A 0S5

Email addresses

Spell out email addresses instead of embedding them within your text.

Instead of : Email us to submit a request.

See how the rule for addresses applies in French

  • 4.10 Adresses

Words and expressions in transition are those written commonly in 2 or more different ways. Reduce confusion by using the following spellings:

  • website (not "web site")
  • web page (not "webpage")
  • web (not "Web")
  • email (not "e-mail")
  • online (not "on line")

See how the rule for words and expressions in transition applies in French

This rule doesn't apply to content in French.

Make the page title unique

Use a page title, headings and subheadings to show structure, lead-in sentence, numbered lists, bulleted lists, alphabetical lists, use column and row headers, use the simplest structure possible, limit the use of texture and colour, avoid having blank cells.

The structure and layout of content components help people find what they need quickly. Content components include:

  • page title  

On a web page

Make sure you:

  • divide the page into logical sections to give an overview of the information it contains
  • focus on the task and show only the information people need to complete the task

Structure the content components efficiently to make your page:

  • more visible to search engines and easier to find
  • easier to view on mobile devices

Across multiple web pages

Think about how a person will journey through the content. If:

  • your web page content covers too many topics, you might need to divide it into several pages
  • several web pages contain pieces of content that relate to the same subject, consider combining them into a single page

5.1 Write useful page titles and headings

In your page title, accurately describe what's on the page. A descriptive page title is important because search engines often display the title without the context that the rest of the page provides.

Most people scan page titles and headings, looking for keywords that will confirm that they have found what they're looking for. People who use assistive technology may listen for keywords using software or may use keyboard shortcuts to access all the headings on a page.

When writing a page title, heading or subheading, make sure that it:

  • gives a clear idea of what follows
  • is short and contains no unnecessary words
  • contains the most relevant terms at the beginning
  • makes sense on its own
  • is followed by text and not by another heading, unless the heading introduces a table of contents on the same page
  • has no punctuation at the end
  • contains no abbreviation
  • contains no promotional messaging (boastful, subjective claims) because it might confuse and stop people from navigating to the page

Most search engines identify relevant search results based on:

  • subheadings

They display the page title as a link on the results page.

Unique page titles help search engines tell the difference between similar pages. They also help ensure that people don't need to look at many pages with the same name to find the information they need.

Check whether your page title is unique by using a search engine. Search for the title of the page followed by "site:" and the domain extension (for example, "food safety site:gc.ca" or "food safety site:canada.ca").

The page title, headings and subheadings help people find information on the screen easily. Use headings to divide text into logical sections approximately every 200 words.

Structuring headings clearly helps establish the authority of one heading over another.

For the page title :

  • use this style: Heading 1
  • apply a Heading 1 only once per page

For the main sections :

  • use this style: Heading 2
  • can appear many times

For subsections :

  • use this style: Heading 3
  • can appear many times and in many main sections

For sub-subsections :

  • use this style: Heading 4 (and so on)
  • can appear many times in many subsections

Having clear and consistently formatted headings helps your web team produce the web pages more quickly and with fewer errors.

Use the automated styles feature of your word processing software to structure headings. The styles feature clearly differentiates headings from content and helps you format headings consistently.

Use the table of contents feature from your Word processing software to automatically generate a table of contents based on the heading levels in your document. Then, check the table of contents to make sure you've correctly structured the page title, headings and subheadings.

Delete the table of contents before you send the document for approval if it isn't required for the final online version.

Navigation pane

Use the navigation pane feature in Microsoft Word. When you select Find (or press Control + F), a small window will display all the headings in your document.

Publication and program titles usually don't make good web page titles

Using the titles of reports, brochures, publications or programs as the web page title can make it difficult for people to find your content, even if it relates to their task.

The titles of publications are usually not written in plain language, short enough or descriptive enough.

To help make sure your page ranks high in search results, use page titles that:

  • describe the page accurately
  • are relevant to what people type into search engines

When you post a publication online, you must adapt it for the web. Here are some things you can do to get better results:

Write a title that describes the contents of the page

The web page title (Heading1) is the title you see at the top of the page when you're looking at it. Make sure that it accurately describes, in plain language, what your publication is about.

Use the first paragraph to introduce your publication

The first paragraph of your web page should introduce your publication in plain language. It helps people who've landed on the page decide whether they've found what they are looking for. You can include the title of your publication here.

Include keywords in the page's metadata

Use the title tag and the description metadata field to improve where your publication ranks in search results. Here's what you can do:

Title tag : The page title tag is the blue hyperlinked text you see when a search engine generates a list of results. Write an effective page title (Heading1), and use it as your title tag.

Description metadata field : The description metatdata is the content you see under the blue hyperlinked text in search results. Avoid listing only keywords , because search engines might ignore these. Write 1 or 2 short sentences that summarize the page. Make sure they contain keywords that people use when searching for your content (for example, abbreviations familiar to your audience).

Refer to the section on plain language for tips on using simple and common words as keywords.

See how the rule for writing useful page titles and headings applies in French

  • 5.1 Rédiger des titres et sous-titres de page descriptifs

5.2 Use lists to help people scan

A short vertical list is easier for people to scan and remember than a long paragraph. If possible, aim for maximum of 7 items in your list.

When writing lists:

  • use positive statements as much as possible
  • place negatively phrased items together, if you must use them
  • use the imperative mood (or command) for the first item of your list, use the same mood for each subsequent list item
  • start your first item with a noun, start the other list items with nouns
  • if a list contains more than 7 items, consider breaking it up into categories

If you need to clarify the relationship between each element, start the list with a lead-in paragraph that:

  • introduces or applies to all the list items
  • emphasizes the common element between all the items

If necessary, specify "all" or "or" in the introductory paragraph to clarify whether the list is comprehensive or conditional. For example, you can write:

  • "You must meet all of the following requirements:"
  • "To be eligible, you must meet 1 or more of the following requirements:"

Use numbered lists to show:

  • step-by-step instructions

Place only one idea in each bulleted item. If you need to include more information to explain an idea, use sub-bullets, but use them sparingly.

Example of bulleted list items

Write : To draft a high-quality source document:

  • arrange your ideas from most to least important to the task
  • test your order with a representative audience
  • use the active voice
  • use the right words
  • write short sentences and paragraphs
  • follow the guidelines in the Canada.ca Content Style Guide

Instead of : To draft a high-quality source document:

  • organize your ideas
  • do not use the passive voice
  • it is important to use the right words
  • use only short sentences and paragraphs
  • use the Canada.ca Content Style Guide to ensure you have followed the guidelines

Take a look at the section on capitalization and punctuation rules that apply to lists .

Only present your web content in an alphabetical order if it's the most logical and intuitive approach for the audience.

For example, listing provinces and territories in alphabetical order could be appropriate.

If you present content in alphabetical order in English, also present it in alphabetical order in French to provide the same intuitive experience.

See how the rule for using lists to support scanning applies in French

  • 5.2 Utiliser des listes d'éléments pour aider les gens à survoler le texte

5.3 Use tables to organize data

Use tables to organize and present data. Make sure that the:

  • value of each cell relates to the column and row headers
  • entries in a column don't contain information that could be considered a subhead
  • value of each cell aligns with the column header that appears directly above it

Give your table a clear title that describes the information in it.

Example of a table that organizes data

Each column and row of a table must have a header that describes the information in that column or row.

Column and row headers are different from headings and subheadings:

  • column and row headers appear in the cells at the top and on the far left of a table
  • headings and subheadings refer to the title of a table or a section of content that appears on a web page

Check that there is a consistent relationship between the columns and rows.

For example, to check the table above, ask yourself whether you can align the information that appears in:

  • the column, with the column header that appears directly above it ("Vote 1," "2011 to 2012" ($ millions) and "2012 to 2013" ($ millions))
  • a row, with the row header that defines it ("Net budgetary authorities" and "Year-to-date expenditures ending December 31")

Your web team will use the information in the headers to code the table. Afterwards, screen readers will be able to correctly interpret the data within the table.

In the following example, all the cells in the first:

  • row are column headers and appear bolded and in grey 
  • column are row headers (except the top-left cell) and appear bolded

By looking at the column headers "Date contract was awarded," "Vendor name" and "Value," people can understand that on February 23, 2010, Management Consulting Group Limited was awarded a contract valued at $285,575.89.

It can be difficult to make tables accessible and easy to read for people using screen readers or mobile devices.

To make information useful to the widest possible audience:

  • turn a complex table into one or more simple tables
  • convert a table to a list if the data is simple

Before: complex table

The following table is complex and poorly designed. It would be difficult for someone using a screen reader or a mobile device to access and understand the information.

Example of a complex table

After: simple tables.

The complex table easily converts into simple tables.

Example: one simple table

If it's important to highlight Stanley Cup championships by NHL conference (region), present the information using 2 simpler tables, and use table titles to clarify which conference the teams represent.

Example: multiple simple tables

The complex table also easily converts into 2 lists.

Example: convert tables to text

Eastern conference National Hockey League :

The Stanley Cup Canadian winning teams

  • Montreal Canadiens: 22
  • Toronto Maple Leafs: 11
  • Ottawa Senators: 1

Western conference National Hockey League :

  • Edmonton Oilers: 5
  • Calgary Flames: 1

Avoid formatting cells with textures or colours, because it can make text difficult to read.

If you must use textures and colours in a table, explain what they mean (for example, in a table note or in a legend). Make sure you comply with the minimum colour contrast rules (1.4.3) from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 .

Never rely on colour or texture alone to convey important information.

Assistive technologies like a screen reader will notify the person if the cell is blank. If a cell has no value, explain why in your table's:

  • surrounding content

You may also write one of the following in the cell, as long as it's clear and doesn't create visual noise that would distract your audience:

  • "n/a" (not applicable)

See how the rule for using tables to organize data applies in French

  • 5.3 Utiliser des tableaux pour organiser des données

Functional images

Decorative images, image sizing and placement, 6.2 include alternative text for images, 6.3 include long descriptions for complex images, 6.4 include transcripts to describe audio and video files.

You can use images and videos to:

  • enhance key messages
  • help people complete their task
  • make complicated information easier to understand
  • reflect Canada's diverse population as much as possible (including seniors, youth, Indigenous peoples, and people from a wide variety of ethnic origins)

When planning your content, weigh the benefits of using videos with the impact on people who will try to view them using mobile devices. Data plans and reliable network access vary.

Obtain permission to publish

Make sure that you have the appropriate permissions to publish images, audio files and videos online. You'll need to have the written proof of those rights. Refer to the Procedures for Publishing or contact your institution's authoring team for more details.

Help with images, audio files or videos on Canada.ca

For specific information about consent forms or licensing requirements related to Canada.ca, contact the Principal Publisher: [email protected] .

6.1 Understand the purpose of images online

Images can distract people. They can also make the page take longer to load. Make sure your images add value to your content.

There are 2 main types of images:

  • functional images
  • decorative images

Functional images:

  • illustrate information or data to help people understand it
  • explain a complex concept
  • illustrate concrete things (such as a valid passport, species at risk, standard symbols)
  • convey branding (such as approved logos and campaign graphics)

Functional images add value to the content because they provide more information than can be provided through text alone. Examples of functional images:

  • infographics
  • illustration

Include the appropriate alternative text to describe the image for people who are unable to view it.

Example of functional images

Map of Canada: current conditions

The chart asks you yes or no questions. If you answer "no", it gives you recommendations of other accessibility projects.

Question 1: Is the entrance to your building barrier-free?

  • If your answer is “Yes”, go to question 2
  • ramps, accessible doors, reserved parking, and leveling the ground can improve the accessibility of your building

Question 2: Are the hallways wide enough for persons with assistive devices, such as electric wheelchairs, to get through?

  • If your answer is “Yes”, go to question 3
  • making halls and doorways wider, installing automatic door operators, elevators or lifts can all help reduce accessibility barriers in your building

Question 3: Are persons with disabilities able to access all necessary floors, levels and sections of your building?

  • If your answer is “Yes”, go to question 4
  • making halls and doorways wider,  installing automatic door operators, elevators or lifts can all help reduce accessibility barriers in your building

Question 4: Can persons with reduced mobility use the washroom in your building?

  • If your answer is “Yes”, go to question 5
  • accessible washrooms or barrier-free stalls should be available in all facilities.

Question 5: Are there automatic door openers to the washrooms? Is the washroom entrance wide enough to accommodate assistive devices?

  • congratulations! Here are some examples of other accessibility projects that EAF funds: safety and security items, such as visual fire alarms; multi-sensory rooms; hearing loops; and more!

Use decorative images only to provide visual context for the following templates:

  • a theme or topic page
  • the home page
  • campaign pages
  • promotional features on a topic page or home page (Government of Canada activities and initiatives)

Don't place meaningful text, such as campaign or program titles, in decorative images.

Get details about the templates above in the Canada.ca Content and Information Architecture Specification .

Example of a decorative image

Decorative image in context to create visual interest

Don’t describe decorative images

Decorative images don’t require a description. Their only purpose is to add visual appeal to content, not to add contextual information. The decorative image in our example just helps to create visual interest. Using a description for a decorative image gives users unnecessary information that can distract from the content on the page.

Alt text for decorative images

Use the null indicator as the alternative text (alt="web content writing style guide") for decorative images. This tells screen readers to ignore the image.

Learn where to place images and videos on Canada.ca and what size they should be:

  • use the templates in the Canada.ca Content and Information Architecture Specification
  • see the Canada.ca page types on GitHub

See how the rule for using images applies in French

  • 6.1 Comprendre le but des images sur le Web

Alternative text (or alt text) is text that describes an image. It makes it possible for people using assistive technologies to access the information conveyed by an image. It also helps search engines better understand the purpose of the image.

When you're writing alternative text for a functional image :

  • describe the image as if you were describing it to someone over the phone
  • use as few words as possible
  • limit the text to around 140 characters (including spaces)
  • use the text that is embedded in the image only if it provides enough context; otherwise, write different text that includes more information
  • use the null indicator as the alternative text (alt="web content writing style guide") if the image doesn't provide any more information than what is already provided in the text on the page
  • don't use "image of..." or "graphic of..." to describe the image; screen readers do this already

Decorative images don't require additional information to make them accessible or visible to search engines. Use the null indicator as the alternative text (alt="web content writing style guide").

See how the rule for alternative text for images applies in French

  • 6.2 Ajouter un texte alternatif aux images

Long descriptions explain information that is presented in complex infographics or images. You must provide a long description if you can't describe the content and function of the image in less than 140 characters. If you can describe the image in less than 140 characters, use alternative text instead.

If a detailed and equivalent explanation of the image appears in the text immediately before or after a complex image, you don't have to provide a long description.

If you provide a long description for an image, you must also provide alternative text for the long description.

Figure 1 illustrates a number of concepts. It requires a long description.

Example: Long description for the balanced scorecard

A balanced scorecard showing how business activities align with an organization's vision and strategy to monitor key performance indicators. Text version below.

Alternative text

You could write the following alternative text for the image shown in Figure 1:

A balanced scorecard showing how business activities align with an organization's vision and strategy to monitor key performance indicators. Text version below.

Long description

You could write the following long description for the image shown in Figure 1:

A balanced scorecard is a strategic planning and management system used worldwide to align business activities with an organization's vision and strategy.

Business activities are grouped into 4 perspectives, all of which are interdependent and come from the vision and strategy. These are learning and growth, internal business processes, financial, and customer. Each has a question associated with it.

  • Learning and growth

To achieve our vision, how will we sustain our ability to change and improve?

  • Internal business processes

To satisfy our shareholders and customers, what business processes must we excel at?

To succeed financially, how should we appear to our shareholders?

To achieve our vision, how should we appear to our customers?

Each perspective can be monitored using the following 4 components:

  • initiatives

Figure 2 is a bar chart. The information in it came from a data table. You could therefore use the table as the long description for this image.

Example: Long description for the bar chart illustrating the proportion of men and women in the public service for selected years from 1983 to 2010

Comparison of the ratio of women and men in the civil service between 1983 and 2010. Text version below.

Source: Office of the Chief Human Resources Officer, Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat Note: Includes all tenures. Figures do not include employees on leave without pay.

You could write the following alternative text:

Comparison of the ratio of women and men in the civil service between 1983 and 2010. Text version below.

You could write the following long description text:

Work with your web team to determine the best way to include the long description information. They'll guide you on how to make sure the image is accessible to people using assistive technology. They'll also ensure that your image meets the Canada.ca Content and Information Architecture Specification .

See how the rule for long descriptions applies in French

  • 6.3 Ajouter une description longue pour expliquer les images complexes

A transcript is the text equivalent of an audio or video file. They make it easier for people who need to access information in audio or visual media but can't hear or see the content because:

  • they have a disability
  • don't have equipment such as speakers or headphones
  • don't want to download a large file

Make sure the transcript describes all pre-recorded information and action, including:

  • on-screen text
  • dialogue and narration
  • important sounds (such as an explosion)
  • important action (for example, people running away from an explosion or characters wearing disguises)

See how the rule for transcripts to describe audio and video files applies in French

  • 6.4 Ajouter une transcription pour décrire les fichiers audio et vidéo

Carefully select related content

Focus on the task.

  • Use parentheses to include contextual information

7.3 Make sure that links work

7.4 linking to internal-to-government content.

A link (or hyperlink) is a word, phrase or image on a web page that people click on to move to another part of the same content or to access an entirely different web resource (such as a web page, video or downloadable file).

People who use assistive technology can navigate web content using links. For example, screen readers list all links on a page without the contextual content.

Your links should be descriptive and able to stand alone so that it's clear what people can expect if they click on them.

7.1 Use links strategically

Be strategic about how you place and create links on a web page and about how many links you provide:

  • include links that directly support the topic or task on the current page
  • link to the original information posted by the authoritative source
  • don't include links to intranet sites unless the content targets government employees, in which case you should add "(accessible only on the Government of Canada network)"
  • don't bury links that are crucial to completing a task in the middle of a paragraph or at the bottom of the page

Example of appropriate use of links

A Food Guide serving is how much food you should eat from each of the 4 food groups every day. In some cases, a serving is the amount of a given food group that you normally eat in one sitting, like an apple. In other cases, the daily amount is more than one serving, such as for rice or pasta.

Number of daily food servings for children, teens and adults

Instead of:

A Food Guide Serving is simply a reference amount. It helps you understand  how much food is recommended every day from each of the four food groups. In some cases, a Food Guide Serving may be close to what you eat, such as an apple. In other cases, such as rice or pasta, you may serve yourself more than one Food Guide Serving.

Providing links to other relevant web pages can help people find related information quickly. Links to your pages from other pages may also help improve where your page ranks in search results.

Be sure to select related links carefully. Too many links on a page can cause people to leave the page without reading important information or can discourage them from completing a task.

See how the rule for using links strategically applies in French

  • 7.1 Utiliser les liens de façon stratégique

7.2 Write descriptive links

A link must describe the content a person will find once they click on it. It's easier to complete a task when a link's destination matches a person's expectations.

Tips for providing useful links:

  • use the first words of the target page or its entire title if it's descriptive enough
  • start with keywords that accurately describe the target page if the page title isn't enough
  • make sure that all links on the same page use unique descriptive text if they link to different target pages
  • when more than one link on a web page links to the same destination page, use the same words for the hyperlink
  • describe any content that must be downloaded
  • write email addresses in full, in lower case and as active links (contact [email protected] )
  • the same link text to point to 2 different pages
  • vague statements such as "click here" or "read more"
  • promotional messaging that might confuse someone who is deciding whether to go to the page that is being linked to

When writing instructions for completing a task, sometimes you need to insert a link to guide the person to forms or other documents. Focus on the action they must perform when you create the link.

Don't repeat the name of a form or document in the steps to accomplish a task if the name isn't descriptive.

Example of the use of links that focus on the task

To get the highest Employment Insurance amount available to you:

  • open the form you need to declare your income
  • the last 52 weeks of employment
  • since the start of your last claim
  • return the completed form in person to the Service Canada office closest to you

To ensure that you are paid the maximum Employment Insurance (EI) benefit rate that you are entitled to, complete the Claimant Attestation - Highest Weeks of Insurable Earnings (Variable Best Weeks) form with the required information about your highest weeks of insurable earnings in the last 52 weeks of employment or since the start of your last claim, whichever is the shorter period of the two.

Use parentheses for contextual information

Use parentheses inside a link to add information that provides context about the linked content. Only provide necessary, contextual information to help users decide whether to proceed.

This guidance applies in the following situations:

  • Example : State of the Canadian Space Sector Report (PDF, 4.35 MB)

Link to external content is in a different language.

Some non-government web content isn't available in both official languages. If you're linking to external web content that isn't available in the language of the current page, say in which language(s) it is available after the link.

  • Add parentheses inside the link and specify the language of the linked content, formatted as (Language X only).
  • Do not translate the title of the linked content.
  • Ensure its language is indicated in the link’s code.

On an English page, write:

  • Link text (French only)
  • Link text (Inuktitut only)
  • Example : To renew your French passport while abroad in Canada, follow the steps described in Effectuer le renouvellement de votre passeport (French only) .

Follow the same structure on French-language pages linking to English content:

  • L’article 508 révisé, la norme EN 301 549 ou les Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) (en anglais seulement)

Link opens video or audio content. Specify the length of the content inside the parentheses.

  • Example: Using Magnifier in Windows: At a Glance - YouTube (2:07 minutes)

When more than one situation applies , include all applicable information in parentheses.

  • Example: Complete your application «  Demande de passeport temporaire (French only, PDF 0.46 MB) » 

See how the rule for writing descriptive links applies in French

  • 7.2 Rédiger des liens descriptifs

Make sure that your links work. Check that they take people to the correct page, which contains up-to-date information, in the appropriate official language. Links that don't work frustrate people and hurt the credibility of your content.

See how the rule for verifying links applies in French

  • 7.3 Vérifier que les liens fonctionnent

In most cases, public-facing content should not link to content that is accessible only through internal government networks. Occasionally, the audience for content that is accessible to the public may be primarily internal.

When a link leads to content available only on internal government networks, write "(accessible only on the Government of Canada network)."

See how the rule for internal-to-government content applies in French

  • 7.4 Créer des liens vers du contenu interne

Case study A: improve plain language and content structure

The Employment Insurance (EI) program offers temporary financial assistance to Canadians and individuals who are legally entitled to work in Canada, have a valid Social Insurance Number and remain in Canada during their benefit period. One type of benefits that the EI program offers is regular benefits. EI regular benefits are offered to people who have lost their employment through no fault of their own (for example, because of a shortage of work or because they were employed in seasonal work) and who are ready, willing, and capable of working each day but unable to find work.

Flesch-Kincaid reading level: 17.2

The Employment Insurance (EI) program could give you temporary financial help if you lost your job.

To qualify for regular benefits, you must:

  • be Canadian or legally able to work in Canada
  • have a valid social insurance number
  • have lost your job through no fault of your own
  • be ready, willing and able to work each day but still can't find work
  • stay in Canada while you're getting EI help

Flesch-Kincaidreading level : 5.9

What we did

To improve this content, we:

  • created a list out of the items in the text 
  • replaced complex nouns with verbs and complex verbs with simpler forms

Case study B: improve and simplify tables

To create these tables, we:

  • divided a complex table into several simple tables that are more accessible and can be viewed easily on mobile devices
  • applied the inverted pyramid approach to provide the summary or conclusion first, followed by increasingly detailed information
  • created a clear title for each table
  • updated titles to reflect capitalization requirements
  • used existing subheadings embedded in the original example to create table headers
  • made sure that the last 3 column headers reflect the unit value of the information in each column
  • added zeros to provide relevant information in otherwise empty cells
  • removed empty cells, rows and irrelevant information (underlining) and subheadings (such as those that were not aligned with the column headers)
  • Addressing Guidelines , Canada Post
  • Clear Writing , Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs of Ontario
  • Communicating with Seniors: Advice, Techniques and Tips , Health Canada
  • Good Fonts for Dyslexia , Luz Rello, NLP & Web Research Groups, et Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Yahoo! Labs & Web Research Group, UPF
  • How Users Read on the Web, Nielsen Norman Group
  • Introduction to Administrative Justice and To Plain Language (PDF), Council of Canadian Administrative Tribunals
  • Introduction to content design , Government Digital Service, GOV.UK
  • Language Portal of Canada , Government of Canada
  • Literacy and Access to Administrative Justice in Canada (PDF), Council of Canadian Administrative Tribunals
  • Literacy and Numeracy in Canada , ABC Life Literacy Canada
  • Lower-Literacy Users: Writing for a Broad Consumer Audience , Jakob Nielsen, Nielsen Norman Group
  • Minimize Cognitive Load to Maximize Usability , Kathryn Whitenton, Nielsen Norman Group
  • Mobile User Experience: Limitations and Strengths , Raluca Budio, Nielsen Norman Group
  • Negative contraction , Richard Nordquist
  • Plain Language Clear and Simple , Public Works and Government Services Canada (reprinted 2003)
  • Plain Language Association International
  • Plain Language, Please! Here's Why to Avoid "Marketese" Only , Sarah Bauer
  • Reaching Out: A Guide to Communicating With Aboriginal Seniors , Health Canada
  • Resources of the Language Portal of Canada , Government of Canada
  • Skills in Canada: First Results from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies , Statistics Canada
  • Study: Literacy and numeracy among off-reserve First Nations people and Métis , 2012, Statistics Canada
  • Study: University graduates with lower levels of literacy and numeracy skills , 2012, Statistics Canada
  • TERMIUM Plus ®, Translation Bureau
  • The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing , George A. Miller
  • Use pair writing to collaborate with subject matter experts , Jonathan Kahn, GatherContent
  • Watch Your Punctuation Online , Search Engine People
  • Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 , World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
  • Why Don't Screen Readers Always Read What's on the Screen? , The Deque Blog
  • Writing for the web , Nielsen Norman Group
  • Writing for the Web: Principles and Guidelines, University of Ottawa
  • Writing Tips Plus , Resource of the Language Portal of Canada, Government of Canada

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  • 9 contributors

Header image reading Microsoft Style Guide on a background with a cup containing a pencil, pen, ruler, and paintbrush.

Make every word matter

Welcome to the Microsoft Writing Style Guide, your guide to writing style and terminology for all communication—whether an app, a website, or a white paper. If you write about computer technology, this guide is for you.

Today, lots of people are called upon to write about technology. We need a simple, straightforward style guide that everyone can use, regardless of their role. And it needs to reflect Microsoft's modern approach to voice and style: warm and relaxed, crisp and clear, and ready to lend a hand.

Here's what you will find in the Microsoft Writing Style Guide:

Top 10 tips for mastering Microsoft style and voice

Bias-free communication

Global communications

We welcome your feedback about the Microsoft Writing Style Guide. Contact us at [email protected] .

© 2024 Microsoft. All rights reserved.

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  • Print this page
  • Other styles AGLC4 APA 7th Chicago 17th (A) Notes Chicago 17th (B) Author-Date Harvard MLA 9th Vancouver
  • Referencing home

Getting started

This APA 7th style guide is based on the citing and referencing sections of the  Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association  (7th edition ) and the APA Style website ( https://apastyle.apa.org ). This guide is designed to help you:

web content writing style guide

Our interactive online tutorials can help you understand the basics of citing and referencing, and why it's important.

Elements of citing and referencing in APA 7th style

There are two places in your assignments and other academic work you need to cite and reference- in the body of your writing ( in-text citations ) , and   at the end of your work (in the  reference list ) where you provide full details of the works you have cited. 

The Quick Start Guide (below) will help you quickly become familiar with the key features of APA 7th, and their application.

Additional resources

Quick start guide [pdf 0.2mb].

A printable two-page introduction with key examples.

web content writing style guide

Find unusual source types

Visit the APA Style Blog for unusual source types not in this guide.

web content writing style guide

APA 7th in-text citation checklist

Helps you cover the important aspects of citing and referencing.

web content writing style guide

For when you need support beyond this guide

web content writing style guide

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  • Last Updated: Feb 15, 2024 4:48 PM
  • URL: https://guides.lib.monash.edu/apa-7

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    This guide establishes the rules you must use to develop and edit English web content that will be published on a Government of Canada website. The rules are different from practices adapted to print to support principles related to accessibility, readability and usability.

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