Is content being suffocated by style guides?
Balancing correctness with communication.
Are UX writers obsessed with correctness?
This question keeps coming up as I wade through a torrent of editorial style guides and as I revise the ones I’m working on. With our focus on grammar, style, and usage, do we risk people thinking of us only as nerdy grammar know-it-alls, ready to pounce on every split infinitive or misuse of the word “fewer”? Are we expected to sigh or swear in disapproval whenever we encounter a passive voice construction like the one in this article’s title?
Of course, content designers and UX writers have a mastery of style; we’re good writers. But our partnership with design and other business partners is deeper than that alone. Our communication concerns encompass things like information architecture, brand voice, context, experience design, and issues like accessibility, gender, and inclusion. Our style guides need to reflect that.
Being right isn’t much fun. Being effective is.
Part of the problem is that people think of style guides as a list of rules and regulations, the one and only way to communicate with words. And somehow these rules are used (by whom?) to police the content and achieve precise, impeccable language.
Wrong.
Recently I was chatting with a content marketing manager about his processes and tools. I mentioned style guides, and he immediately started talking about how they don’t police what their writers do. Thinking of the style guide as a useful tool didn’t enter his mind. I appreciate the flexibility he gives his team, but I’m concerned that he’s not letting them have a basic tool to ensure consistency and quality in what he called the “content experience.”
Content designers share this enforcement problem with the design systems community. In a recent working session, a design systems team manager from a leading tech company described the time when she and her team were charged with enforcing adherence to the design system and all its strict ways of building the product. I saw the grimace on her face. “That must have made everyone hate you,” I said.
“Exactly,” she replied. “It wasn’t a good time.”
Nobody likes a design system police officer. Or a grammar scold.
Be right. And also be nice.
Like a design system, content guidelines provide a foundation for what designers — content designers, in this case — can build on. The goal is to answer questions of style, spelling, voice, and so forth so that writers can help deliver consistent, quality experiences. And writers don’t have to waste time questioning and researching and redefining essential communication elements. (Well, not too much, anyway. It’s in our nature as writers to always be aware of and question how we communicate.)
Some of the better style guides push us beyond a list of rules and advance us toward the effective communication we aspire to. The Readability Guidelines published by Content Design London are one strong model. They answer questions of grammar and usage, and they also keep the focus strongly on the audience they need to reach. A list of who the guideline helps appears at the top of most pages.
With a similar focus on audience, many style guides offer guidance on keeping writing conversational. This is an example where being correct isn’t enough. The goal is communication, not correctness. So if slang or ending sentences with prepositions can better reach your audience, so be it; go and get your conversational freak on.
Writers start with foundations like these and then build. What happens next, the creativity and innovation, is still up to them. We provide guidelines, not laws.
I’m just a bill. Yes, I’m only a bill.
Style guides aren’t the executive or legislative or representative branch of government. Some real business executives make the decisions, engineers write the laws in code, and design and product teams try to represent user and business needs. Where are we and our style guides in all this? We’re kind of like the National Endowment for the Arts. We care deeply about our issues, others are vaguely aware of us, and most just take us for granted or ignore us altogether.
I could get lost in this metaphor, but the point is that style guides aren’t solely for governing content. My hope is that our style guides ground the content-creation process in our shared experience, knowledge, and creativity.
I apologize for the U.S.-centric metaphor. But I imagine that citizens in most countries can relate to the tangential, sometimes tense relationship the arts have with governments.
In defense of correctness and competence
I’m not enough of an anarchist to shout down the cult of correctness. I’m sure you can find someone in social media who’s doing that right now. Being correct is important. Our teams and customers depend on us to be right and reliable, and our style guides need to support us — not scold us — as we do that.
Furthermore, as machines begin to generate more content, we and they will need strong, thoughtful guidance. We’ll need to use our style and systems thinking to document our editorial choices and deliver them in a way that the machines can decipher and use for good. We need human insight and oversight to enforce style and establish structure for content that emerges from — and is influenced by — artificial intelligence and machine learning.
We can’t really overvalue competence, especially in a time when inexperienced, ill-prepared people are being placed into positions of power. The competence we document in our standards is a critical way of expressing what we value, what we’ve learned, and how we use those things to move forward. Our style guides reflect the expansive, shared knowledge of the content community. They’re there for all of us to build on.
Start building
Want to keep exploring style guides? Yuval Keshtcher compiles a list of notable ones in his UX Writing Hub.
Sarah Richards writes about the open-source, evidence-based readability guidelines she and others are creating at Content Design London.
Jason Fox challenges some of the efforts put into style guides. He writes many true things in “You don’t need a voice & tone style guide.”
