Do we need a style guide for our help center or knowledge base? And if so, which style guide? How do we enforce the style guide? Should we manage our terminology?
These questions arise in multiple places and I always shake my head. Not because I think they’re silly questions—they’re not—but because half the time, someone wants to create these from scratch.
That’s a silly—and expensive—activity.
Why is that silly? Because we have established existing robust style guides in the industry already. So there’s no value add to recreating one when you can just grab one and there you go.
Style guides enforce terminology
You need a style guide, so everyone knows how to talk about stuff. Your company needs to talk about the same stuff the same way, regardless of the group creating the content. You need to manage your terminology so when you call something a widget, so does everyone else in your company.
Recommended content style guides
I often work with companies setting up new post sales content development groups or seriously changing their existing groups. It’s the niche I really enjoy. And these are the style guides I recommend when they don’t have one (and it’s shocking how many places don’t have one):
| Style guide name | What you use it for |
|---|---|
| Microsoft style guide | What we call that stuff in the UI of our products |
| AP style guide or Chicago style guide | How we talk about stuff in general |
| Your product style guide | How we talk about our product names and area of the product. |
This is all you really need for the post sales content to manage your terminology. But getting people to write in them is an entirely different problem.
Enforcing a style guide in your knowledge base
Now that you have your content style guides nailed down, you must enforce them. Content that isn’t following the style guides at least dilutes your brand, and costs you unneeded dollars when you localize. And probably confuses the reader.
Enforcement is the trick.
Of course, you make the style guides available to everyone. And provide a 30-minute training to manage your terminology that you record and make available. And you create a job aid for people to refer to support the style guide in the knowledge base. The training and job aid covers the standard things people are going to write all the time, like:
- Click vs. select (Click the item vs. Select the item)
- Use definite articles in front of product names vs not (The Blob product vs. Blob product)
- Product possessive vs. not (The Blob product’s new method for searching vs. The Blob product includes a new method for searching)
- Drop-downs and pull-downs vs. list
- Radio buttons vs. item vs. click
- And so on.
And still people won’t follow the style guides to manage your terminology. Not because they’re bad, but because it’s hard to always think in the style guide. And your support people, for example, are writing quickly with little attention to how they are crafting their words. And following a style guide requires building a new muscle. Not everyone wants to do that.
You have 2 options to enforce the style guides: Manual review to manage your terminology, or use a tool to support the people writing the original content. And the answer depends on the business case you can make.
Use people to manage your terminology
Of course, all content is reviewed before it’s released to customers, right? Another set of eyes are critical to verify coherence and completeness, at least. Even your support people need eyes on content before it’s released to customers.
This review process is also a great place to manage your terminology.
See how much time people are spending on reviews, where style guide issues need to be addressed. You can assign a dollar amount to that time. Figure out how much people reviews for mechanics of the style guide is costing the company.
Use a tool to manage your terminology
Tools are available for enforcing style guides because of the cost of, for example, translating content that doesn’t follow the style guide. These are usually called terminology managers. Writer and Acrolinx are two that work well at different price points. Grammarly also works well if you buy the Business package.
These tools are different from a grammar tool. These tools know what the style guide is and enforces those ways of talking about those things.
Are you better off using humans or buying a tool to manage your terminology? It depends on what the human cost of manual reviews are.
For some companies, the cost of manual labor is higher than the cost of the tool. In those cases, I recommend the tool. Let the machine do what the machine is good at, and let the humans focus on coherence and completeness.
But if you have people writing content that supports your users in using your product, you need style guides. You can’t afford to let everyone write how they feel today.
Use your content strategy to improve the process, reduce the costs of content development, and increase brand alignment.
Leave a Reply