The Austin Stone Style Guide

The Austin Stone Style Guide helps us reach our people with clear, concise content, written in a manner that meets people’s expectations of who we are and who we want to be as a church. It governs how we write and contains information about our voice, correct spellings of terms, basic writing mechanics, and properly formatted citations. If you write for or send communications on behalf of The Austin Stone, this guide is for you.

How to Use The Austin Stone Style Guide

The Style Guide is organized in four sections:

• An overview of The Austin Stone’s voice and why style guides matter. 
• Glossaries for Austin Stone terms, religious terms, and commonly confused or misspelled words. 
• Mechanics, such as commas, dashes, and apostrophes.
• Citations for Scripture and other people’s work.

Turn to the appropriate section for the work at hand. As an example, if you’re writing a Bible study, you’ll need to reference the fourth section to cite your sources correctly. But if you’re writing an email to a congregation, you likely only need the glossaries or mechanics.

The Style Guide also includes appendices called “quick-start guides.” These resources can help a new hire who’ll be responsible for crafting congregation newsletters or someone writing an article for The Austin Stone website. The other appendices concern roles involved in creating content: writers, copy editors, content editors, and proofreaders. These can be shared with volunteers or used when training a staff member to copy edit or proofread.

Questions about The Austin Stone Style Guide should be directed to Erin Feldman at The Austin Stone Institute.