Brand Guides and Style Guides
The company you're writing for may have a brand guide or style guide that you'll be expected to adhere to while crafting copy for their products or services. This will usually come from the marketing or public relations department, but an ad agency or major design firm may also create one of these documents for its client.
Most computer programs, such as Microsoft Word, will allow you to add special words with unique formats to the dictionary database to prevent these words from being flagged as typos. This can save you a lot of time and help you to avoid errors when dealing with branded names and phrases.
A brand or style guide contains a list of rules or guidelines concerning the style and tone of the copy, as well as specific words, phrases, blurbs, and other sales messages to be used. These documents also contain information for graphic designers, including color palettes, layout templates and guidelines, and instructions on how to treat logos and other visual elements.
Here's an example of what you might find in a corporate style guide affecting copywriting:
In informal documents, such as customer letters and e-mails, the company can be referred to as “we.” For more formal documents, such as press releases and corporate materials, use “the Company.”
Pay particular attention to any instructions on how certain brand names need to be formatted in the text. For example, Morris Real Estate Marketing uses the term AGENTaccess. It's spelled the same way every time, with the capitalized AGENT and the italicized access. The two words are also grouped together as a single compound word. This is important to know because computer spell-checkers may want to pull these two words apart. And that error could easily find its way into the final layout.
If you need to follow a brand or style guide, keep it handy on your desk as you work on a project. It's easier to follow the guidelines the first time than it is to make corrections and alterations to your copy later on.
