One of the issues that comes with writing any form of copy for an organization is sticking to a style guide. These little details (like whether a headline is in All caps, title case, AP style etc) may seem insignificant (especially if it is the difference of a capital here or there), but make a difference when you look through a brands website and see inconsistencies. At best, it is simply a case of bad design and branding that a few grammar police and eagle-eyed readers will notice, at worse it can be confusing as to what exactly you are referring to.
With that in mind, here are a few tools that can help you stick to a brand copy guidelines without all the stress.
TitleCase
TitleCase is a handy website that helps you generate a corrected form of your headline in the appropriate style. All you need to know what the correct style title is, copy your headline draft, paste it into the text box on the site, press convert, and then copy the format you need. This tool is available wherever you have an Internet connection, so although you can do this via other means (like a custom Python script in editorial on iOS), this solution works for everyone.
CoSchedule Headline Analyzer
Of course, title case gives you a variety of formats, but if you like “Start case” (every word has the first letter capitalized) and want to check how effective it is as a headline, you might want to use CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer which also gives you a score and makes some suggestions for how to improve your headlines. Obviously this only works on Start case which isn’t as common as Title case but it’s still useful.
TextExpander
One of the mistakes I keep making (even after all this time) is writing “Churchmag” instead of “ChurchMag.” That second capital may not seem important, but imagine if I was writing an article about a church who published a print magazine and wanted to talk about “this church mag is…” It might seem confusing. TextExpander helps me avoid these simple style mistakes (and many more). I set up some snippets where the trigger is the mistake (I.e. Churchmag) and the expanded phrases is the correct option (ChurchMag), now it is almost impossible for me to type the incorrect version.
Custom Dictionary in iOS and Android
TextExpander does work on iOS, but only when using the TextExpander keyboard or in apps which support it. That’s not too much of a problem except for the fact that the TextExpander keyboard doesn’t have all the features of the built in keyboard (i.e. Alternative languages, as accurate key recognition), so I don’t use it all the time. For those times when I don’t use TextExpander on iOS or Android, I have added a custom dictionary option so it will correct any misspellings like “churchmag” to the right form.
I hope these tools can help you more easily stick to your church branding.
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