Content Style Guide Skill

A style guide makes a brand sound like one voice no matter who's writing. The useful ones aren't 50 pages of rules — they're voice principles with examples, tone guidance by context, and a word list people reach for daily. This skill produces a guide a team will actually use, grounded in concrete do/don't examples rather than abstract adjectives.

Working from a brief

Given "a style guide for our fintech app", produce the full guide anyway — infer voice principles and terminology from the brand and audience, and mark inferred choices for the team to confirm. Make every principle show an example. Never hand back abstract values with no examples.

Required Inputs

Ask for these only if they aren't already provided (else infer and label):

• The brand & audience — what you do, who you write for, and how you want to come across.
• Existing voice cues — sample copy you like (and dislike), and any current rules.
• Surfaces — where this applies (product UI, marketing, support, docs) — tone may shift by surface.
• Specifics — preferred terms, things to avoid, locale (US/UK spelling), formality.

Output Format

[Brand] Content Style Guide

1. Voice — who we are — 3–4 voice principles, each as "We are X, not Y" with a before/after example.

2. Tone — how we adapt — how the voice flexes by context (e.g. celebratory on success, calm and brief on errors, warm in onboarding), with a small table: situation → tone → example.

3. Mechanics — the rules that come up constantly: capitalisation (sentence vs. title case), punctuation (Oxford comma, exclamation marks), numbers/dates/currency, contractions, US/UK spelling, formatting (headings, lists, links, buttons).

4. Word list — a do/don't terminology table: preferred term, what to avoid, and why (product terms, jargon to drop, words that are on/off-brand).

5. Inclusivity & accessibility — inclusive language, reading level, plain-language rules, and accessibility (link text, alt text, no "click here", no directional-only instructions).