Ask most people what a style guide covers, and they'll say something like "grammar rules" or "whether to use the Oxford comma." That's part of it—but it's a small part. A good style guide is closer to an operating manual for how your organization communicates, and it covers a lot more ground than punctuation.

Here's what actually belongs in one.

1. Voice and tone

Voice is who your organization is when it writes. Tone is how that voice adjusts depending on the situation. A children's hospital foundation might have a voice that's warm and hopeful—but the tone of a donor thank-you note should feel different from the tone of a crisis update.

A good style guide defines both: three to five words that describe your organization's voice (say, "direct, warm, and unpretentious"), plus guidance on how tone shifts across a few common scenarios—celebratory news, sensitive news, routine updates, and asks.

2. Grammar and punctuation conventions

This is the part everyone expects, and it still matters—mostly because there's rarely one "correct" answer, just a consistent one. Does your organization use the Oxford comma? Do you write "email" or "e-mail"? Numerals or spelled-out numbers under ten? None of these has an objectively right answer. What matters is picking one and sticking to it everywhere.

3. Organization-specific terminology

This is often the single most valuable section, and the one a generic style guide (like AP or Chicago) can't give you. It covers things like:

  • The official name of every program, initiative, and campaign—and how it's capitalized
  • Preferred terms for the people you serve (members, participants, clients, athletes, families)
  • Titles and how they're formatted (Executive Director vs. executive director)
  • Words to avoid entirely, and what to use instead

For a sport organization, this might mean settling exactly how to refer to different competition levels. For a nonprofit, it might mean deciding how to write about the population you serve in a way that's accurate, current, and respectful.

4. Formatting standards

The small mechanical stuff that adds up: how dates are written, how phone numbers are formatted, how acronyms are introduced on first use, how bullet lists are punctuated. Nobody notices when this is done consistently. Everybody notices, on some level, when it isn't.

5. Inclusive and accurate language guidance

This section evolves the most over time, which is exactly why it belongs in a living document rather than something everyone tries to remember. It covers how to write about disability, race, gender, and other identities accurately and respectfully, and gives writers a clear, current reference instead of leaving it to individual judgment call by individual judgment call.

6. Channel-specific notes

The way you write a press release isn't the way you write an Instagram caption, and both are different from a grant application. A strong style guide doesn't try to force one voice into every format—it gives specific notes for how the core voice flexes across web copy, email, social, and print or reports.

7. Editorial checklists

The most-used section of any style guide isn't the reference material—it's the quick checklist a writer runs through before hitting publish. A newsletter checklist. A social post checklist. A press release checklist. These turn the guide from something people consult occasionally into something people actually use every time.

The common thread

Every one of these sections exists to answer the same underlying question a writer asks a dozen times a day: how do we usually do this? A style guide's job isn't to make writing more restrictive—it's to make that question take ten seconds to answer instead of a Slack message and a fifteen-minute wait.

Housestyle Co. builds custom style guides covering all of the above, tailored to how your organization actually communicates—not a generic template. Get in touch to see what a first draft could look like.