Turn your house style into rules a machine can check
Every organisation with a style guide has the same problem. The guide is right, and the content doesn't follow it. Not from defiance — from load. Nobody can hold a whole style guide in their head while also writing.
The decisions that survive are the ones that get checked. So the practical question about any style rule is: could a machine check this one?
Sort your style decisions into 2 piles
Pile one is judgement: tone, structure, what to include, how to sequence an argument. Humans only.
Pile 2 is mechanics. We say 'participants', not 'consumers'. The program name takes a lowercase p. 'ASAP' gets spelled out. The old product name never appears again. Every one of these is a find-and-flag rule. Machines beat any human reviewer at this pile, because machines don't tire on page 30.
Pile 2 is usually the bigger one, which means much of your style guide can enforce itself.
Write rules the way you'd tell a colleague
A usable house rule has 3 parts. What to find. What to use instead. And why — ideally with a link to the decision or the published reference. 'consumers → participants, because the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) style says so, see this page.' If you can write that sentence, you've written a checkable rule. Keep the why. Rules with reasons get followed, and bare corrections get argued with.
Just as important is the ignore list: the terms your checker should never flag. Product names, program names, deliberate terms of art. A checker that cries wolf about your own brand gets closed and never reopened.
Start from your decisions log, not from scratch
Don't invent rules — harvest them. Every editorial argument your team has settled is a rule waiting to be written down. You get more from 10 real rules that encode real decisions than from 50 hypothetical ones. Add one whenever a review comment repeats.
Where the machine comes in
We built this workflow into Confetti. Your rules live in a plain text file, one rule per line: find => suggestion | note | link. An ignore: line holds the whitelist. The file runs alongside the built-in Style Manual and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) checks. All of it runs in your browser. Keep one file per client or program and swap them as you switch jobs. When a rule fires, the writer sees your suggestion, your reasoning and your reference. That's the style guide, finally showing up at the moment it's needed.
A style guide that reviews every page beats a beautiful PDF nobody opens. And it frees your human reviewers for the pile that actually needs them.
Photo by Ilya Semenov on Unsplash.
Did this land?
I write these to be used, not just read. Tell me if this wouldn't work in your organisation, and why.