Training Bulletin Issue 48

How a style guide can improve your sales, not just your writing

There’s nothing like a good customer review to help you promote your product or service. An online clothing retailer found that its sales improved markedly when it corrected the grammar, spelling and punctuation of reviews of its products – so it actually paid people to do this. The critical point here is that the reviews were both negative and positive and this aspect was not changed. Just the English usage was corrected.

This shows how highly readers rate correct writing: it suggests that the content is thorough and objective and this is valuable even in the case of negative reviews. The same trends were found when checking the effect of reviews on online book sales and hotel bookings: correctly written reviews increased sales, regardless of whether they were positive or negative.

Even if training budgets are limited, with this kind of finding, you need to ask whether you can risk customers or stakeholders seeing errors in the documents that represent you.

Four things a good style guide should do for you

1. Define your voice

How do you want to be perceived by clients? Are you formal or casual? And if so, how much? Too much of one or the other can veer from sounding distant and bureaucratic to speaking to idiots. You can’t afford to get this wrong or to leave it to individual staff to guess what is the right tone.

2. Ensure consistency

Professional and consistent documents make you look competent. There are many areas in English usage where lots of different ways of writing are equally correct. But if everyone does their own thing, it makes your documents seem jumbled and confused.

3. Maximise correctness

A style guide should also address common problems to avoid, with examples of what is wrong and right. Mistakes in documents are the quickest way to lose credibility and trust. And we have just seen that even errors in third party reviews can affect sales.

4. Define company-specific usage

Many organisations have usages specific to them such as conventions for capitalisation, unusual spellings for trade and product names and preferences for abbreviations. Make sure everyone knows and uses your preferred conventions as these are an important part of your branding so you stand out from the competition.

Defining your voice

The table below shows conventions that will make you sound formal or casual. The degree to which you do so will depend on how many choices you make from each side of the column. Some documents such as email or web copy need to be more casual for maximum readability. Some documents may need to adopt a more formal tone, such as contractual letters or legal documents.

	Formal	Casual
Word choice	Elucidate Investigate Endeavour Indicate	Clarify, Explain Find out Try Show
Sentence Structure	Passive: A report was written by X The customer will be contacted	Active: X wrote a report We will contact the customer
Voice	Third person: The company has The client will	Second person: We have You will
Contractions	I have Do not We will	I’ve Don’t We’ll

Ensuring consistency

In many cases, there’s more than one way to write things. Make sure everyone uses the same conventions – this also makes editing easier if you have many contributors to a document.

Dates: the most common convention now is a two digit day (one digit for numbers one to nine), the month as a word and a four digit year. So 7 September 2011 rather than any of the following: 07/09/11, 7th Sept ’11, Seven Sept 2011

Numbers: generally write as words the numbers one to ten, and the rest as numerals. However, don’t start sentences with numerals. If you include symbols such as the percent sign either put both as words or use a numeral with a symbol. Monetary values are usually numerals, with a currency symbol, and if necessary to two decimal places.

Maximising correctness

Avoid these common problems that your spell checker won’t pick up:

• It’s with an apostrophe is short for it is or it has. Its without an apostrophe means something belongs to it.
• To affect something means to have an impact of some sort on it.
• To effect something means to bring it about, to make it happen.
• Never write would of, should of, could of, might of. They are would have, should have, could have, might have.

Always use the spell checker as it will pick up most other things. But if you choose a correction that it offers you, make sure you pick the right one! Beware of picking impotent for important, incontinent for inconvenient, pubic for public and others that will have your readers laughing – at you, not with you.

Defining company specific usage

Capitalisation

Capitalise the first word of sentences, proper nouns such as names of places, people and companies, days and months. Look out for unusual capitalisation in trademarks or brand names such as eBay or bmi. Americans capitalise seasons but the British don’t. Decide if you write Accounts Department, Accounts department or accounts department and be consistent. Make the same decision for people’s work titles.

Abbreviations

E.g., or eg? Etc., or etc? I.e, or ie? Or avoid these altogether and say, for example, and so on, and that is.

Do you have an accepted abbreviation for your organisation’s name or products and services? How is it capitalised?

Layout

Choose a preferred font in at least 11 points – something fairly standard rather than an outlandish one – and make sure that all your templates use it. Decide on a layout – left aligned and ragged right edge, like this newsletter, are more readable. Define your heading styles and preferences for bullets. All these add up to a first impression of competence or sloppiness.

Do you need more?

This is a very quick overview of some of the answers your style guide needs to provide for your staff. We can help you to create a guide to support your specific voice and branding, and provide more details on the examples we've given here. You can contact us by emailing

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Follow this link for the dates of our public courses.

One-day courses are either £495 or £395 + VAT per person

Two-day courses are either £850 or £750 + VAT per person.

One-to-one consultancies cost £850 + VAT for one day or £500 + VAT for half a day, held at your premises.

We also offer private group courses at your premises. Please call call 01235 60 30 22 for details.

How to book

To book, call Abi on +44(0)844 445 7743, or use the booking form.

Kind Regards
The Plain Words Training Team