Element Three Style Guide
When I first set out in my role as chief editor and proofreader at Element Three, I was basically starting from scratch. The role hadn’t existed before me, so there were no processes, no rules I had to follow. I was able to make it my own. And part of making my mark, initially, was determining what “Element Three style” was going to mean.
I was advised to just pick an existing style guide and use that, but I knew from my journalistic background that I was going to have issues with that. It’s hard to find one style guide—whether it’s Associated Press, or the Chicago Manual of Style, or any of the others—that perfectly fits your needs as an organization, unless it’s made specifically for you. The AP style guide is great for newspapers, but it doesn’t really fit the needs of a marketing agency. And it contains some silly and archaic rules that I hated, and frankly, I wasn’t having it.
So instead of just slapping our name on an existing style guide, I built my own.
Unsurprisingly, something like that became a pretty monumental undertaking. I looked at several existing style guides to get an idea of how they’re formatted, and what kinds of things got covered—grammar and punctuation, spelling, capitalization and formatting. One thing I noticed: each guide focused on things common to the industry. The AP talked a lot about the way in which quotes are used, for example. Others were more geared towards publishers, or academics. So I decided mine needed to be structured in the same way.
I also considered the fact that, while Element Three employs a number of extremely talented and experienced copywriters, they wouldn’t be the only ones using the guide. From subject-matter experts writing for our own blog to account leads writing emails to client executives, many members of the team were far less experienced, and sometimes needed a hand with the difference between “lie” and “lay.” And not all of them knew that periods go inside quotation marks, like that one did.
The finished product was a hit.
Well, “finished.” One of the things I learned quickly was that it was pretty much impossible to get everything that was needed in the style guide with just a few weeks of work. Since I built it in Google Docs, it became a living document, which was continually updated until the day I left Element Three.
But the style guide got enough playing time that our Executive Creative Director later tasked me with creating similar guides for some of our most important clients, Airstream and Newmar.