Style & Writing Standards
Compare government style guides before you pick one
Teams that write for the public end up choosing a style guide the way they choose a format: by what the work actually requires. This page compares the guides in the library on the points that change day-to-day writing, so you can adopt one and stop re-litigating it.
Why this comes first
A style guide is a decision you make once and apply for years. Read four guides side by side and the differences that matter to your team — sentence case, plain language, link text, bullet punctuation — show up fast.
The four guides in play
Each has a job. Read them as four positions on the same question — how much detail a publishing team actually needs.
Library references
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HMRC content style guide
Tax content and terminology
Built for tax content and terminology. It states plainly that it is used alongside the GDS style guide rather than instead of it — so if you publish UK central-government copy, plan for two references, not one. Terminology lists are curated for customer-facing wording, and the guide keeps content style separate from the language used to describe software implementation.
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Buckinghamshire Council style guide
Local publishing rules
Adapts central-government standards for local publishing. Where the national references stay general, this one gets concrete about sentence case in page titles, link wording, bolding, and document references — the level of detail twenty editors on one page actually need. It is the clearest example of a council guide that clearly derives from a wider standard.
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ARPANSA Style Manual
Writing, editing, proofreading
Released under FOI and written for an agency's own writing work: recommended everyday words, inclusive language, and a distinction between tone for informal notes and tone for external documents. It is also the guide in the set with explicit rules for bullet-list punctuation, which is why teams that argue about commas keep coming back to it.
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Digital.gov directory
Collected agency guides
A directory rather than a standard. It collects agency style guides, including documentation-oriented guidance, without imposing one house rule. Use it to see how several agencies answered the same question — useful when your team publishes product documentation next to policy pages and you need one wording choice for both.
Sentence case and headings
Sentence case means only the first word and proper nouns are capitalized. Buckinghamshire specifies it for page titles, and that choice cascades further than most teams expect.
It affects headings, table labels, and navigation. The practical benefit is fewer judgment calls and better scanning — a reader moving down a page can tell a heading from a sentence without extra signal. The trade-off is real: sentence case looks unfamiliar to teams used to title case in print, and someone will ask about it in the first week.
Sentence case
Apply for a permit to host a street event
First word and proper nouns only. Easier to scan, fewer debates at review.
Title case
Apply for a Permit to Host a Street Event
Familiar from print, but every editor has to decide which words are "important".
Table labels
Sentence case flows into column headers, so pick it before your templates are built rather than after.
Navigation
Menu items inherit the same rule. Mixed casing across a nav bar is the first thing readers notice.
Plain language rules that actually bind
Every guide here prefers everyday words and minimal jargon. What differs is enforcement — and that is the part that decides whether a rule survives a busy publishing week.
The ARPANSA manual recommends everyday words and inclusive language, and separates the tone it expects in informal notes from the tone it expects in external documentation. HMRC goes further on vocabulary: it builds terminology lists for customer-facing content and deliberately separates content style from the language software implementation uses. That separation matters more than it sounds. When the same term appears in an interface and on a help page, someone has to decide which wording wins, and HMRC has already made that call.
Active voice is the default across all four guides. It is the least contested rule in the set and the easiest to defend in review: a sentence that names who does what needs no further explanation.
Active voice and links
Links are where these guides get specific, and where a vague habit costs the most. Link text should describe the destination. "Click here" tells a screen-reader user nothing, and it fails the same test when someone scans a page looking for a specific document. Accessibility guidance reinforces the point from a different direction: link text is often the only thing a visitor hears before deciding whether to follow it.
Buckinghamshire gives practical rules for links, bolding, and document references — exactly the level of detail a publishing team needs when twenty people edit the same page and nobody owns the final wording.
Lists, numbering, and punctuation
Numbered steps are required when order matters — procedure, sequence, anything a reader executes. For bullets, the guides differ on terminal punctuation, and the ARPANSA manual is the one in this set with explicit rules for it. Pick one convention, write it into your own short addendum, and apply it everywhere.
Writing question
Where guides agree
Where they differ
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Numbered steps
Use a numbered list whenever the order changes the outcome.
Little dispute. The guides simply expect numbering for procedure.
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Bullet punctuation
Keep one convention across the whole policy set.
ARPANSA states explicit rules; other guides leave it to the team.
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Headings and labels
Sentence case throughout, once the choice is made.
Buckinghamshire names page titles; teams extend it to everything.
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Link text
Describe the destination so the link works out of context.
Buckinghamshire gives worked examples; others state the principle.
Inconsistent punctuation across a policy set reads as carelessness even when the content is correct — and readers notice it before they notice the rules behind it.
Accessibility and readability together
Accessibility rules affect plain language too. Descriptive headings, real list markup, and short paragraphs help screen readers and tired readers at the same time.
Mark up real lists
A bullet that is just a dash character disappears for assistive technology. Use list markup so the structure is announced, not guessed from punctuation.
Headings that describe
A heading is a navigation aid. "Requests" beats "General information" because someone skimming headings is deciding whether to read the section at all.
Readability scores are a smoke signal
Not a target. A legally precise sentence can score poorly and still be the right sentence. Use the score to spot a paragraph that needs work, not to rewrite a clause that has to stay exact.
One guide for policy and product docs
The Digital.gov directory points to documentation-oriented guidance for exactly this reason: product documentation and policy pages share the same constraints — short sections, task-first phrasing, scannable headings.
How to choose for your team
Start with the jurisdiction and audience you publish for, then narrow by how much detail the guide gives on the questions your editors argue about.
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Name the jurisdiction
Federal compliance writing usually follows a federal guide plus your agency's own addendum. Local publishing often follows a council or city guide that itself derives from a national one, the way Buckinghamshire does.
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Check the detail you need
If link text, bolding, and bullet punctuation are recurring arguments, pick the guide that answers them explicitly rather than the one that states a principle and leaves the rest to you.
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Decide about product docs
If you publish product documentation alongside policy, adopt one guide and add a short house addendum for the gaps instead of maintaining two standards that drift apart within a year.
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Write it down and stop
Record the choice, the addendum, and where the guide lives. The value of adopting a style guide is that the decision stops coming up, and that only happens if it is written somewhere people can find it.
Questions teams ask before adopting a guide
The same handful of objections come up in every adoption meeting. Here is how the guides in this library answer them.
Ask a style questionCan we follow more than one guide?
Yes, and HMRC expects it. Its guide states that it is used alongside the GDS style guide rather than instead of it. What causes trouble is not two references but two unreconciled standards, so write down which one wins when they disagree.
Does sentence case apply to navigation and table labels?
It should, if you want the consistency to hold. Buckinghamshire specifies sentence case for page titles, and headings, labels, and navigation all read against those titles. Mixed casing in a menu bar is the first inconsistency a reader registers.
What do we do about bullets and commas?
Follow the guide with explicit rules — the ARPANSA manual includes them for bullet-list punctuation — then write the convention into your own short addendum so new editors do not have to rediscover it.
Should a readability score block publication?
No. Treat it as a smoke signal, not a target. A legally precise sentence can score poorly and still be the right sentence; the score is most useful for finding paragraphs that need a second look, not for rewriting clauses that have to stay exact.
How do we handle product documentation?
Adopt one guide and add a short house addendum for the gaps. The Digital.gov directory collects documentation-oriented guidance from several agencies precisely because product documentation and policy pages share the same constraints — short sections, real headings, task-first phrasing.
Where to go next
Pick a guide from the set above and write your addendum once. When the wording questions are settled, the remaining work is about how documents are structured, reviewed, and kept current — those are the next two references worth reading together.
Yulmeris Policy & Documentation publishes plain-language policy references for public-sector and compliance teams in the United States. Reach us Monday to Friday, 9:00 AM – 6:00 PM Eastern Time, at [email protected] or +1 202-457-6857.