Style Guide
I have built and extended style guides in two contexts: for a 1,300-article enterprise knowledge base at Intermedia, and from scratch for a B2B platform at Betby that was launching documentation for the first time. Select a project from the navigation menu to see the details.
Style guide work is not a one-time writing project. It is an ongoing process of auditing what exists, defining what should be true, testing rules against real content, and making sure the standard actually gets used. The sections below describe how I approach each stage.
Audit and Research
A style guide that isn't grounded in the actual content it will govern tends to produce rules that look good on paper but don't hold up in practice. Before writing any new rule, I start with the content !!! success "What this produces" An evidence base, not a preference list. Every rule traces back to a documented pattern from real content — which also makes it easier to explain to contributors why the rule exists.
Defining the Standard
Defining rules means making judgment calls: what level of prescription is useful without being constraining, which edge cases to address explicitly, and which reference standards to defer to. It also means knowing when an existing convention is worth keeping and when it needs to change.
For writers coming from national or regional documentation standards
The Microsoft and Google guides represent the international baseline expected in global English-language TW roles. Familiarity with at least one signals that a writer can work in US-based or globally distributed teams without needing alignment coaching on the fundamentals.
Testing and Validation
Rules that haven't been tested against real content have unknown failure modes. Testing surfaces gaps before they reach contributors — and before the gap is a contributor's mistake rather than a rule that wasn't specific enough.
What this produces
Rules that have been stress-tested before rollout — and a team that has already practiced the workflow by the time the tooling is ready.
Adoption and Handoff
A style guide that contributors don't use is decoration. Getting a guide adopted means making it accessible at the right moment, connecting it to the tools people are already using, and ensuring it can be maintained after the original author moves on.
What this produces
A guide that outlives the person who wrote it — because the process for maintaining it is as documented as the rules themselves.
articles during her internship. The full DEV-built rewriting tool was still in final stages and hadn't been rolled out yet.