Speaking the Same Language

A style guide guide: How to design the voice of a product and the guidelines that hold it together

The style revolution

Forging a product voice is a tricky thing. An exercise in prioritizing the collective over the individual, it also requires an odd mix of idealism and pragmatism. You must design, meticulously, a voice that many others will wield.

If style is your job, chances are you spend a lot of time balancing a love for language and a deep desire to see it represented elegantly with the need for an adaptable, resilient content strategy that will grow with your organization. It’s not the power of the collective voice that you need to believe in so much as the possibility of getting everyone to speak together in the first place.

The earliest stage of voice design is a soul-searching endeavor and a kind of revolutionary act. It involves asking a series of increasingly existential questions: What values do we want to communicate in our product? What persona do we embody? Who are we? The brainstorming, ideating exercise of answering these questions is deeply satisfying. It’s dynamic and open and cathartic in the way of no-wrong-answers work, where the process is as important as the conclusion. It’s an act of renewal, a return to originary enthusiasm, a chance to reorient your organization around a more nuanced understanding of your product and the problems that it solves.

Yet this energizing moment is just one piece of the larger narrative user experience. What follows is fundamentally important but decidedly less glamorous. If staking out your voice—and, in the process, declaring who you are—is a revolutionary act, the next steps are a series of nitty-gritty foundational decisions that determine how that definitive act will sustain itself in practice.

In the course of human events

Why stage a style revolution in the first place? Inconsistent style doesn’t crash the product. It doesn’t (usually) generate bug reports. It does, however, waste everyone’s time and create an incoherent user experience — which, if we’re counting, often results in support tickets from users confused by linguistic incoherence in the product.

Rebelling against this inconsistency is great, but establishing a consistent narrative framework means sitting down and agreeing on rules. Your Constitution, so to speak, is the style guide. This document lays out (necessarily persnickety) guidelines that writers for your organization and product adhere to, whether they agree with them or not. A style guide, in other words, is a social contract: it asks individuals to surrender pure stylistic autonomy for the good of the collective voice.

Style guidelines are by nature doctrinal and constricting, but they’re also liberating. They eliminate a lot of discrete decision-making, not because individual choice is a liability but because it’s not worth everyone’s time to consider, on an individual basis, when the Oxford comma is necessary for clarity. In declaring independence from inconsistency, a style guide demands conformity but also frees up the individual to consider other questions.

We the people

Because a style guide requires compliance and conformity in return for stability and cohesion, how you compose one and gather consensus on it is significant.

Diverse representation in the drafting process matters — if you work in product design or in marketing, chances are you don’t know much about writing for support or recruiting. If the process is a democratic one—think your very own Constitutional Convention — it should generate a lot of heated, healthy debate. Steel yourself for civilized battle. There will be Oxford comma supporters and detractors, proponents of title case and fervent opponents, believers in the power of the exclamation point and excitable punctuation agnostics. There will be winning, losing, and compromising. And there will be concern for the organizational equivalent of states’ rights:

Should marketing adhere to different rules than product for capitalization of new features? Does support need a modified set of guidelines around tone? If everyone else agrees on a “You get one” rule for exclamation points, but a recruiter spends most of their time interacting with university students, should they have explicit license to ignore that guideline?

Not all such questions surface in the drafting process, so outside feedback matters. A few months back, I opened up version one of Evernote’s style guide to the entire company for comments, for a limited period of time. Democracy is messy, and so was the process of dealing with all of that feedback. The end goal, however, was to empower people across my organization to police their own writing, not to instate myself as the word czar. Without addressing concerns from across the organization, we risked creating a monolithic, unilateral set of rules that could, quite literally, cramp the style of teams that need to speak in slightly different ways.

Ourselves and our posterity

Treating the drafting process as a democratic one and thinking early about stylistic states’ rights forces you to ask a difficult question about the voice that you’re designing: Will it scale?

It’s a humorless thing to say, but humor, which is culturally specific and possibly unteachable, frequently presents a scaling problem. Perhaps you’re witty — of course you are!—but does that mean your colleagues share this trait? Fat chance. So then, do you become the arbiter of wit for your entire organization? Does all irony flow through you? No, because that’s not scalable.

The real difficulty with asking writers to be “funny,” of course, is that funniness is highly subjective. The artisanal nature of writing for a product in its early stage means that your voice can be as idiosyncratic as you are, but leaning heavily on humor or quirk or wit or irony as a central character trait also means you’re less likely to develop a voice that grows with your organization.

Adaptability matters for stylistic governance. Products evolve, and it follows that a voice is never completely fixed.

A style guide functions best when interpreted as a dynamic, living document rather than a static set of commandments.

Leave strategic space for individual contribution to that evolution — if the bulk of your guidelines are precise and specific, some deliberate ambiguity can pay off.

Rarely, for example, am I allowed to forget this caveat in our style guide at Evernote: Diction should be “clear, without any technical jargon,” but “occasional 25-cent words are OK.” To be comprehensible is key, but we focus primarily on writing in a way that is collegial, conversational, and purposeful, all characteristics that encompass a broader meaning than “easy to read.” The 25-cent clause frequently sparks discussions — do we use words such as “germane” to talk about features that surface related content? —and forces us to reevaluate how we speak to our users.

To rebel against the insidious tyranny of amateur writing and linguistic incoherence is usually a popular move — no one wants to sound inarticulate — but the rules required for deliberate stylistic governance can be a harder sell. A social contract isn’t designed to flatter individualism or prioritize self-expression or appeal to discrete preferences. The upshot is that, when you write as part of an organization, you don’t necessarily sound like yourself. You sound like your product.

And it’s not such a bad thing, in an industry that prides itself on disruption and technological revolution, to come face-to-face with the need for thoughtful collectivism. To forge a product voice is indeed disruptive — it means throwing out clunky writing practices and drafting your own rules. In the end, however, good style is less about pride of authorship than about the difficult feat of many individuals coming together to speak as one.