It's All About the Style

At Circle Social, we are working to change the industry from the inside out and one way we do this is by creating quality content that follows some basic style rules.

Prior to this lesson, you should have learned about stigmas and the importance of people first language. In this lesson, we are going to outline each piece of our style guide for you to reference whenever you need it while you are writing or editing pieces.

Circle Social's Style Guide

The Circle Social Inc. Style Guide

Branding

Everything we write for a client should voice their brand in some way. We do not want generic content, every client needs to stand out with their own voice. The same post written for 6 different clients should sound slightly different based on their particular take on things.

Danger and Death

We want to be realistic about the dangers of addiction and untreated mental health conditions, but we do not want to use hyperbole or fear as a primary tactic.
We will often cite data and statistics that can be scary or shocking, but that information needs to be followed up with actionable advice. Our goal in this context would be to emotionally jolt the reader into realizing this topic is serious and then help them understand and improve the situation.
For example, the idea that “addiction will only get worse or lead to death.” This is rarely the case. In fact, 80% of all individuals who struggle with addiction will simply walk away from it on their own without professional help.
For those that need professional help, most will find lasting recovery on their 2nd to 4th attempt.

Real World examples

When appropriate, which is much of the time, our articles should include real-world examples to connect to the reader’s personal experience.
For example, “sometimes drinking can get out of control” is a very generic statement on its own. We can follow-up this up with, “It’s when you suddenly find yourself blacking out every weekend, when you promised your wife you would stop yet here you are again, or that embarrassing morning when you wake up next to your significant other and find you wet yourself in bed.”

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Titles and APA Styles

For all titles, headings, and subheadings, follow APA Style. Exceptions to this are if clients are already using another style and want to continue in that style, which we'll inform you about before writing. Otherwise, assume APA.

Wikipedia and Value

We hate Wikipedia. If an article sounds like a Wikipedia piece, it needs to be re-written.
Everything we write needs to add value to the reader above and beyond what they can already find in a simple Google search.
We need real-world examples, emotions, and actionable advice in our content. Ideally, our content brings new information to the table or looks at things in a different light.

External linking and sources

The following guidelines are in place to ensure we provide value, trust, and comply with regulating policies.
This applies to all external links and sources within all public facing client content and materials developed by Circle Social Inc.

Make sure all external links are to a trustworthy non-commercial entity. Examples include non-profit organizations, government organizations, universities, colleges, medical journals, scholarly journals, peer-reviewed studies, and scholarly articles
Noncommercial. In general external sources should be non-commercial in nature.
No treatment centers. We do not link client sites to other treatment centers, or behavioral health centers, even if they are well known, nonprofit, or otherwise great facilities.
Original source. Only link to the original source material, not third party articles.
No Wikipedia links or similar wiki-style websites.
There are many websites that look authoritive, but are actually owned by for-profit companies and used as lead aggregators. Examples of these sites are addictioncenter.net, therecoveryvillage.com, americanaddictioncenters.com, drugabuse.com, rehabs.com, dualdiagnosis.org, rehabcenter.net, and many others. The safest bet is to only use authoritative academic journals or direct sources as we never want to link to these types of lead aggregator sites.

Here are some good search engines for scholarly source information:

Google scholar

microsoft Academics

Science.gov

semantic scholar

wolfram alpha

researchgate

Circle Social Style Guide