I’ve been heads down with our team getting Conveyor ready for a launch. And most of my work is writing. When you write copy for a product, you quickly come to realize how massive an effort this is — and just how much copy is required.
Tracking all your work and changes is not an easy task. And so I’ve been keeping an eye out for people describing their own writing practices of guidelines. As UX Writer is relatively new as a career choice, there’s not yet a lot of material to be found. Oh, you can find voice and tone guides (see Mailchimp and Shopify). And design or development frameworks are a dime a dozen.
But writing frameworks? This is a mythical creature, oft mentioned but never seen.
However, I did come across this nice resource: Design Better from the folks at InVision. It’s a large collection of resources (they say books, but it’s a collection of writing on the web) on various matters relating to design. And they included a decent chunk on writing.
It focuses on not only defining what a guideline is, but how to create one of your own.
Writing guidelines also help evolve your voice. Just as your personality matures over time, your voice will evolve as your company grows. Guidelines define what you should sound like right now, so when you do steer away from them, you’ll know that you’re doing so intentionally. (“I’ll just throw an emoji in this subject line,” turns into, “Hey, let’s test how emoji perform and see if they’re worth adding to our writing guidelines.”)
It’s a small section of the site overall, but it’s far better than most of the stuff Google has to offer when you go looking for “writing frameworks”.
