Building an institutional style guide

Every institution has a writing standard; few have written it down, and almost none enforce it. The path from folklore to enforcement runs in four steps.

1. Start from the national convention

Do not draft from scratch. Your country's official conventions cover most decisions already (WriteX calls this the guide's derivation). You configure only what makes your institution different.

2. Codify the incident list

Ask comms what has actually gone wrong: a minister's title dropped, a brand transliterated three ways in one report, a Gregorian-only date on an official letter. Each incident becomes a rule: dignitary titles, the institutional dictionary, date formats with the Hijri pair.

3. Decide the editorial defaults

Transliteration policy (غوغل or جوجل), tashkeel policy (usually ambiguous-words-only), emoji policy for official correspondence, and the register for public texts. These are toggles, not essays.

4. Assign, measure, iterate

A guide nobody is assigned to governs nobody. Assign it to teams, watch the style-guide violation counts in analytics, and tune the rules that fire constantly: either the writers need a briefing or the rule needs an exception.

The whole apparatus lives in WriteX style guides: derivation, per-language rules, team assignment, and violations as a live error category.