I teach English for a living, and one day one of my students brought in a document she had kept when she left her last job. She worked for a multi-national company, and the document was their 'style guide'. (Take a look at The Guardian Style Guide for a good example of wham I'm talking about.)

This was a set of guidelines for communication intended for use by employees, and had two major purposes. One was to ensure consistency in all their external communications, to ensure that when dealing with customers and business partners they always used the same terminology and spellings. For instance, there was a section devoted to job titles. Is the person at the top of your company to be referred to as the CEO, Managing Director, Chairman, or what?

When you think about it, this is very important. People who are not familiar with your company may not know who you are talking about, so actually it's very important that one person is always referred to using the same title to avoid confusion. A good style guide is actually part of a branding effort. It helps to identify who you are and how you do things. If your external communications contain a lot of jargon then that gives a very different impression than if they are always staid and boring, or very precise and detailed. A mix of styles doesn't give a clear message, it doesn't help with creating an image of your organisation.

The other purpose of the style guide was to ensure clarity of communication within the organisation. Consider this quote:

"Professor Cary Cooper advises the government on stress in the workplace. Britons take 14 million sick days due to stress every year. He believes e-mail is a major source of employee anxiety.

"E-mail inboxes are causing employees concern, because of the number of e-mails and the poorly written e-mails. They really want to find some sort of solutions for these problems," he says.
(BBC Online)

Having clear guidelines about when and how to send mail has a major impact on a company's bottom line. Instead of letting your employees spend their time trying to understand a pointless email, you set a standard of communication which ensures that firstly, written communications are easily understood by everyone in the organisation. You can also, as part of that process, try to prevent people from sending unnecessary mail.

It's all about efficiency, and that's why major corporations spend a lot of money on them. For smaller organisations, this sounds like rather a major expense. But does it need to be so?

For instance, in the same vein as the CV & Study Plan Writer , why not use a set of customisable fields to allow an organisation to tailor a standard guide to their own needs? You write one (two, one US and one Commonwealth) guide, figure out the major variations, and provide spaces to add the stuff that's unique, then generate a guide that is available to all staff and regularly updated.

eg "The name of the organisation is 'ingeniousity', with a small 'i', not 'ingeniousity.net' or.......

We use 'organisation', not 'organization'."

It would be a subscription service, probably best sold as part of a package by third parties. 

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