Why Your Site Needs a Style Guide and a Governance Handbook: Interview with Courtney Reyers of NAMI

February 9, 2015

Read my interview with Courtney Reyers, Director of Publishing at the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). Courtney has just led NAMI through the two-year process of re-thinking, re-architecting, re-writing, and re-launching the NAMI.org website. Learn how and why Courtney created a NAMI Editorial Style Guide and a NAMI Web Governance Handbook, and download these documents. If you’re planning to create a style guide or web governance document (or process) for your organization, read Courtney’s advice. She’s got a lot of great experience to share.

Download our “Guide to Writing for Social Media”

July 2, 2012

Check out our latest handy free download for wordslingers and communication campaigners: Guide to Writing for Social Media. We developed this 57-page guide for the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The examples in the guide are health-related, but the advice about writing for social media is practical for any organization that wants to provide high quality social content for customers and readers

Update: Federal Plain Language Guidelines – March 2011

March 2, 2011

Many thanks to the folks at PlainLanguage.gov who have just updated their Federal Plain Language Guidelines and published them at their site. I'm so excited about this wonderful resource that I'm presenting the entire Table of Contents here so you can easily click through. You can also download the Guidelines (PDF). I hope you'll use […]

Awesome Download: Toolkit for Making Written Material Clear and Effective

October 28, 2010

Government communicators have produced something wonderful, again. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has just published an 11-chapter downloadable Toolkit for Making Written Material Clear and Effective: “The Toolkit includes detailed guidelines for writing, graphic design, and culturally appropriate translation from English into other languages.  It includes a book-length guide to methods of […]

2010 AP Stylebook Announces “Website” is One Word; “E-Mail” Retains Hyphen

June 3, 2010

The Associated Press announced yesterday that it has added a separate Social Media Guidelines section to its 2010 AP Stylebook. The new section includes information on correct use of such terms as “… app, blogs, click-throughs, friend and unfriend, metadata, RSS, search engine optimization, smart phone, trending, widget and wiki.” The new Guidelines offer a […]