How to create a style guide

A style guide settles the small questions that otherwise get argued in every review: whether it’s email or e-mail, whether headings use sentence case, how to refer to customers, which words the company avoids. Without one, each writer follows their own habits, and editors correct the same things over and over.

This page covers a writing and content style guide, the kind that governs voice, grammar, terminology and formatting. It walks through how teams usually put one together, where those guides tend to go stale, and how to build one in Fabric from your own examples and keep it in use, including by the AI tools your team writes with.

How teams usually create and keep a style guide

Most style guides begin as a Google Doc or Word file that one person writes over a few weekends. It’s quick to start and easy to share. As it grows past twenty pages, it gets hard to search, people keep local copies, and it becomes unclear which version is current.

Moving it into a wiki such as Confluence or Notion makes it easier to find and link to. The common complaint is upkeep: wikis go out of date unless someone owns them, and new rules agreed in a meeting or a chat thread often never make it in. Content governance covers the ownership side.

Larger content teams sometimes adopt a published guide, such as AP or Chicago, and write a short house supplement on top. Others pay for writing tools that check copy against their rules. Both work, though the house rules still need to be written down somewhere first, and the examples that explain them are usually scattered across old documents.

Step 1: Gather examples of your best writing

A style guide is easiest to write when you can point at real examples. Create a folder for the project and collect writing your team considers good: strong blog posts, a well-received proposal, product copy that tested well, an email that customers responded to. Drag files in, upload them, or paste text and links straight into Fabric.

Add examples from outside too. With the browser extension for Chrome, Safari and Firefox, save pages or selected text from other companies whose tone you admire, and a screenshot of the page if the layout matters. Add a comment to each item saying what you like about it, so the reason is recorded alongside the example.

Step 2: Ask the AI to draft the patterns it finds

Open the examples folder and ask the AI assistant. It limits itself to that folder, so you can ask questions like “what tone do these pieces share?”, “how do we format headings and lists?” or “which product terms appear, and how are they capitalized?” Answers cite the documents they came from, so you can check each pattern against the source.

Save the useful answers as notes. They form the first rough draft of each section: voice and tone, grammar and punctuation, terminology, formatting, and inclusive language. You can choose which model to use, since one subscription covers models from several major labs.

Step 3: Write the guide as one living document

Create a document in the notes and docs editor and shape the drafts into the guide. Keep each rule short, followed by a do and don’t example. Where a longer illustration helps, link to the source example in your folder or embed it in the guide.

Invite the people who should shape it as editors. Editing happens in real time, and other collaboration tools, such as comments and mentions, suit the debates that style guides tend to produce. The AI assistant can also edit the document directly, with accept or reject on each change, which helps when you want to tighten wording across the whole guide.

If you’re building several reference documents for the team, Building a template library covers ways to keep them consistent.

Step 4: Share it with the team and outside writers

Share the guide with the whole team. Give most people viewer or commenter access and keep editing to a few owners; roles and permissions can be set at space and file level. Commenters can highlight a line and suggest a change, and owners mark each comment completed once it’s handled.

Freelancers and agencies need the guide too, usually without access to anything else. Publish the guide as a web page: click Share, open the Publish tab and click Create link. Turn off indexing by search engines if the guide is internal. Edits to the document in Fabric update the published page, so the link you sent last year still shows the current rules.

Step 5: Make the guide available to AI writing tools

Much first-draft writing now starts in ChatGPT or Claude. Connect those tools to Fabric through the Fabric MCP server at https://mcp.api.fabric.so/mcp. Sign-in is OAuth, with no API keys, and setup takes under a minute. In Claude, add Fabric from the official connector directory. In ChatGPT, open Settings, go to Connectors, choose Add Connector, enter the server URL, give it a name and save; then start a new conversation, click More, choose Add Connectors, select Fabric and sign in when prompted.

Once connected, the AI tool can search Fabric and read file contents, so a writer can ask it to follow the house style guide when drafting. On the Team plan, Fabric Tag lets people ask questions like “do we hyphenate long-term?” by mentioning Fabric in Slack or Discord.

For a broader approach to team reference material, see How to create a shared knowledge base.

Frequently asked questions

What should a writing style guide include?

Most cover voice and tone, grammar and punctuation, terminology and product names, formatting such as headings and lists, and inclusive language, each with short examples.

How long should a style guide be?

There’s no fixed length. Many teams start with a few pages covering the questions that come up most in reviews, then add rules as new ones appear.

Should we base our style guide on AP or Chicago?

Many teams adopt a published guide as the default and write a short house guide for the exceptions and company-specific terms.

How do I keep a style guide up to date?

Keep it as one shared document with a few named owners. Commenters suggest changes, owners mark them completed, and a published link shows the current version.

Can AI help write a style guide?

Yes. Fabric’s AI assistant can analyze a folder of your existing writing, describe the patterns it finds with cited sources, and edit the draft with accept or reject on each change.

How do I get ChatGPT or Claude to follow our style guide?

Connect the tool to Fabric with the MCP server. It can then read the guide’s contents when you ask it to write in your house style.

How do I share a style guide with freelancers?

Publish it as a link. Published links are view only, and edits in Fabric update the page they see.

What does this cost?

Notes and publishing are on the free plan with limited AI use. Fabric Tag needs the Team plan, and team pricing is not per seat. See team pricing.