I had never even considered that something such as a style guide would ever exist, but it certainly makes sense that it does. It’s like how if a soundtrack accompanies a movie really well you don’t even notice it’s there, but if there were no music at all you would definitely be able to tell. After going through a few examples of the style guides we were given in our class to use, I find it even more intriguing that each style guide is so different based on what it puts emphasis on.
Now there are some constants that seem to appear in most of them like a word list. The word list is an interesting concept, because there are some words I don’t know how to spell, simply because they seem to have a million variations. I thought there was just one correct way of spelling them, and I just didn’t know it, but as it turns out, when it comes to those words a certain website will decide how they’ll spell it and put it in their style guide so every article stays consistent.
Getting into the differences, I’m going to use BuzzFeed’s style guide and compare it to the Google developer documentation style guide. At their core, they both share the same purpose. Where they diverge comes from what they put emphasis on. BuzzFeed’s style guide layout and content emphasizes how they structure the article and less on the content of their article. For the most part, their rules are for punctuation and for citation. On Googles style guide, it appears that the emphasis is on how the sentences are structured. There are many grammar rules on things that you are and aren’t allowed to use, not because they’re grammatically incorrect, but because Google prefers them differently, e.g., anthropomorphism or contractions.
Not only does this effect what content the style guide chooses to include, but how it’s laid out. I think Google’s layout is way better than BuzzFeed’s and its because of its emphasis on content. Google has only one item per page, and an interlinking table of context on the side, making it easy to get to anything at any time. It breaks up content based on things like grammar, punctuation, or organization, and has individual links for each specific item. BuzzFeed has their style guide as one massively overwhelming page with a table of context at the top. The table of context only shows the categories, so once you go to that section, you still have to search through it and hope that what you’re looking for is in it.
Either way, I think both style guides do a good job getting across what they want to. They are very clear on what they want their employee’s content to look like, and they are, for the most part, well structured and easy to understand.
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