Project Standards: Keep your Writing Consistent & On Brand

In this article, copywriter Iain Broome shares how using a Project Standards template can improve your writing, be it technical or fiction.

Just as novelists, poets and screenwriters get to inhabit their characters, we copywriters get to become our clients. We speak on behalf of entire organisations. We take on their voices, quirks and backstory. Our words are theirs. And while that can be quite exciting, it also brings huge responsibility. When we speak on our client’s behalf, we have to use an appropriate tone of voice and be consistent.

Anything off brand will be noticed and, well, we won’t have done our job properly. A copywriter can spend the morning in Client A’s tone of voice, and the afternoon writing on behalf of Client B, and each will have its own editorial guidelines to follow. I work as part of a copywriting team – it’s fast-moving and projects come and go between us. We’ll often pick up where someone else has left off. It’s a typical agency environment.

So how do we make sure that we write consistently? How do we avoid changes in style and tone of voice? Well, it’s actually pretty simple. For every client, we create a ‘Project standards’ document.

What are Project standards?

You’ll no doubt be familiar with Style guides and you may well have your own preferred go-to version when you want to check how a certain word or phrase should be written. Most copywriters (or copywriting teams) are exactly the same. It’s a case of choosing one you like best and sticking with it, occasionally consulting other guides if there’s any debate.

A Project standards document is essentially a project-specific style guide. It’s what we use to log any words or phrases that relate to a client’s brand or tone of voice for any given project.

How does it work?

Let’s say I’m working on a project for a company called ‘CITY taxis’. It’s a new client, so I’ll open a new Project standards document and note the date, client and project in the header. Below that, I’ll create two columns. One column is titled ‘Word or phrase’ and the other ‘How it should appear’. And that’s it. Simple. All I need now is some content.

Standards in action

CITY taxis have told me that their name should always appear as all capitals for the word ‘city’ and lower case for ‘taxis’. Under my ‘Word or phrase’ column I write ‘CITY taxis’. Under ‘How it should appear’, I write ‘As shown’.

That’s a straightforward example, but sometimes standards need more explanation. Let’s say CITY taxis tell me that they only ever refer to ‘taxis’, never cabs, cars or anything else. Under ‘Word or phrase’, I write ‘taxis (usage)’. Under ‘How it should appear’, I write ‘Only use taxi or taxis. Never use alternatives, such as cab, cabs, car, cars or hire cars’.

Essentially, wherever there are standards specific to the client or their project, from naming structures to hyphen usage, include it in the document. Everything goes in. It all helps.

Maintenance and version control

A Project standards document should be a living, breathing entity. Clients may change their minds and new standards will come along. It’s important that you and your team keep your Project standards documents up to date. An up-to-date document makes writing for clients much easier and means you don’t have to memorise all their different ways of doing things. A good version control system is recommended – something to make sure you know when a document has been updated, or which is the correct version to use. You could include a series of dates in the document’s header, or simply save each update as a new document and number the files – v1, v2, v3 and so on.

However you decide to maintain Project standard documents, the most important thing is to keep them current. The time spent will help you and your team in the long run.

Fiction writing?

This is a post about copywriting and writing for others, but I recommend creating Project standards for all your writing. For example, I had one when I was writing my novel. It included character names, settings and some sentence structures I used frequently. Instead of searching a 200+ page document, I was able to check my Project standards and answer consistency questions quickly and easily.

Project standards documents are useful for any writing project.

Download a free template

Rather than include lots of images in this article, I’ve put together a free Word template (.doc) that you can download, use and adapt however the heck you fancy. There’s also a Rich Text Format (.rtf) version too.

Download the Project Standards Word template.

Download the Project Standards Rich Text Format document.

Image courtesy of Hugger Industries.