I’ve only occasionally discussed style guides before, and then chiefly to lament their being stuck in MS Office purgatory. Frankly, it’s just not a terribly exciting topic; besides, a style guide is one of those things many marketers and communicators hate to love. But I was recently asked a question that made me think we need to discuss them more.

The query was about tricky situations in enforcing style and how to deal with them, and I immediately thought of my time at my last job. This was a small web marketing agency—sometimes big enough to field a baseball team, other times just big enough to have a starting basketball roster and a sixth man—and I was responsible for maintaining style points and curating our content. I also was the only person there with extensive content production and style management experience.

Enforcing style there could be challenging, and I ended up doing so through a combination of coaxing, teaching, and harsh editing—to varying degrees of success, I’ll allow. On those occasions when my efforts failed to produce the fruit I wished to see, I usually chalked it up to a lack of personal investment on the part of the writer. These were designers, coders, and project managers, after all; arcane style points didn’t seem to concern them. Having revisited those experiences over the last week, however, I’ve decided the real problem was a lack of authority, real or imagined.

There are several ways organizations deal with style adherence, and they may or may not work for you:

• Centralize your communications. This is typical for larger organizations, and it makes sense; all publishing goes through a single section or department that also curates style. Nothing escapes without review.
• Democratize your style guide. Many organizations make their style guides available to all employees, but there seems to be little expectation they will all follow it to the letter. Forward-thinking organizations share the guide and ensure all employees understand and use it.
• Create department-specific style guides. I saw this in another job; the marketing and correspondence sections (yes, there was a full section dedicated to writing letters on real paper) had separate guides and separate rules, though some elements were shared. In my estimation, this only worked because there was a very strict separation between the sections and their duties.
• Forget style altogether. Ok, so that’s extreme. But many places have chosen to put down only general guidelines for art/font and brand name use and let ‘er rip. Maybe they’ll toss in the Chicago manual for fun.

One unifying concept here is that none of the above methods will work if there’s no authority behind them. If writers or contributors have no expectation that rules—limited though they may be—will be enforced, there is no incentive for them to follow. You have to put some teeth behind the whole endeavor, or you’ll end up spending a lot of time enforcing things like serial comma use.

At my last position, it wasn’t articulated that we absolutely must adhere to style guidelines, much less that I was the grand poobah of enforcement. Had those concepts been explained staff-wide, I might have been able to avoid sticky style situations altogether.