Every team makes the same small writing decisions repeatedly. Is it ecommerce or e-commerce? Do we write 5pm or 5 pm? Is the product name capitalised in the middle of a sentence? Without a record, each writer answers differently, and each answer costs a few seconds of thought plus a correction later.

A house style guide is the record. Two pages is usually enough. It is not a grammar textbook and it is not a brand book. It is a list of choices, made once, that everyone can follow.

Record decisions, not principles

Principles are easy to agree on and hard to apply. Be clear and consistent could describe any guide ever written. A decision looks like this: use sentence case for headings, use digits for numbers above nine, write dates as 12 March 2026.

Each entry should be short enough to scan and specific enough that two people would apply it the same way. If an entry needs a paragraph of justification, it is probably two decisions or a matter of taste that belongs in a conversation, not a document.

The categories worth covering

Most disputes fall into a handful of groups. Start with the ones your team actually argues about, which you can find by scanning recent edits and comments.

  • Dates: format, order, and whether to use ordinals
  • Numbers: digits or words, ranges, percentages, currency
  • Capitalisation: headings, job titles, product names, departments
  • Punctuation: serial comma, dashes, apostrophes, quotation marks
  • Abbreviations and acronyms: which are allowed, when to expand
  • Terms: preferred words, banned words, words with a legal meaning
  • Links and buttons: capitalisation, whether to end with a full stop

Twenty to thirty entries covers most of the ground for a small business. A guide with two hundred entries will be admired and ignored.

Source rules from real corrections

The best entries come from edits already made. When an editor changes e-mail to email for the fourth time, that is a rule waiting to be written down. When a customer-service reply contradicts the website on refund timing, that is a rule about terms, not just a one-off fix.

Keep a running note. Every time you correct the same thing twice, add a line. After a month you will have a guide built from evidence rather than from a template you found online.

Say which authority you follow

Pick a dictionary and a style reference for the cases your guide does not cover, and name them at the top. This ends most arguments before they start. If the guide is silent and the reference is ambiguous, whoever is editing decides and adds the entry.

For most businesses, one British or American reference plus a short list of local exceptions is plenty. Mixing conventions is what makes a page look unedited, not the choice of convention itself.

The value of a style guide is not that it picks the best option. It is that it picks one option and stops the conversation.

Whichever authority you name, the split shows up in spelling first. British vs American English in business writing lists the pairs that come up most often, and when to keep each.

Keep it findable and short

Put the guide where drafts are written, not in a folder nobody opens. Use headings that match the question a writer would ask: Dates. Numbers. Product names. Capitals. If the document has a search function, the entry titles should be the words people search for.

Add a two-line summary at the top for the most common cases. Most people will read the summary and stop there, which is fine if the summary is right.

Decide how it changes

Anyone can propose an entry. One person approves. Changes are dated at the bottom of the document, so a writer can tell whether they are looking at the current version. Review twice a year and delete rules nobody follows, because an ignored rule teaches people that the whole guide is optional.

When a rule changes, fix the templates at the same time. A style guide that contradicts the CMS defaults will lose, every time, to the path of least resistance.

What not to include

Leave out explanations of basic grammar. Leave out tone-of-voice guidance, which belongs in a separate document with examples. Leave out anything that only applies to one person's writing habits, and leave out rules that exist to win an old argument.

The test for any entry: would a freelancer, given this line and nothing else, produce the version we would have produced? If yes, keep it. If no, rewrite it or drop it.

  • Dictionary and reference named
  • Twenty to thirty decisions, dated
  • Entries titled by topic, not by rule
  • Two-line summary at the top
  • One approver named
  • Templates updated alongside changes
  • Reviewed twice a year
  • Freelancer test applied to each line

Two pages, one owner, a review date. That is the whole system, and it will save more time than a longer document ever could.