Your own style sheet, checked against a document HOUSESTYLE

Nobody reads the style sheet, and it is not contempt

Every organisation over about thirty people has one. A page on an intranet that says the product is written with a capital P, that we say “colleagues” and not “staff”, that we have picked one of “data is” and “data are”, and that nobody is ever to write “going forward”.

It goes unread because it is a list of forty things, and no human retains a list of forty things about spelling while also trying to work out what a paragraph should say. That is not a discipline problem to be solved with a reminder. It is what attention is like, and the answer is to check afterwards rather than to remember during.

Why this one has no opinions

The checkers that exist have their own views baked in. They will tell you to use the active voice, to shorten your sentences, to avoid a word somebody at that company disliked. Somebody else's idea of good English is not your style sheet, and a tool that argues with your house style is worse than no tool: people turn it off, and the real rules go unchecked along with the invented ones.

So this ships empty apart from an example. The sheet is a plain text list you paste in: the wrong form, the right form, and optionally a note saying why. It is yours, it lives wherever you keep it, and nothing here has a view about any of it. Check a document and you get the places your own rules were broken, with nothing else mixed in.

That also makes the sheet portable in the way it needs to be. It is text, so it can go in the intranet page it came from, in a repository beside the documents, in an email to a freelancer, or in a brief to an agency, and the agency can run it against their draft before they send it to you, which is the moment it is actually worth something.

Writing a sheet worth checking against

Only put in rules that are decidable by looking. “Be concise” cannot be checked by anything and does not belong in a machine-readable sheet. “colleagues, not staff” can.

Write the reason where there is one. “Use people, not users: the regulator's language” is a rule somebody will follow after they have left the induction. A bare prohibition gets treated as a preference and quietly ignored.

Keep the product and trade names in it. That is the half people care about and the half that embarrasses an organisation in public: the capitalisation of your own product, the legal form of the company name, the spelling of a partner's brand.

And accept false positives gracefully. A rule like “no utilise” will flag a direct quotation from somebody who wrote it, and the answer is to leave the quotation alone. A checker reports; the writer decides.

Nothing you paste is uploaded, which matters for a document that has not been published yet. Nearby: PLAIN answers the different question of which sentence a reader stops at, CADENCE measures the habits that identify who wrote something, and DELTA shows what changed between two drafts.