Across a 150-acre campus shared by three separate institutions and dozens of departments, the same information was routinely being written a dozen different ways — inconsistent abbreviations, clashing tone, no shared answer for something as simple as how to format a date or a degree.
I developed the Auraria Campus editorial style guide to fix that, growing it out of a larger branding initiative aimed at bringing a single, recognizable voice to communications across the campus. The guide defined our voice in concrete, usable terms — service-oriented but not servile, colloquial but not slangy, concise but not curt — paired with practical writing and formatting rules built on AP and APA style, so that any writer on campus, regardless of department, could produce copy that sounded consistent and authentic.
It became the reference communicators on campus turned to, turning “reel it in” from a vague mandate into a document stakeholders could actually follow.