5 reasons I used Coda to create a stronger style guide for Grammarly
Grammarly’s Senior Standards Editor shares why moving the team’s internal style guide into Coda helped make it better, stronger, and easier to use.
Cristina Schreil
Senior Standards Editor at Grammarly
5 reasons I used Coda to create a stronger style guide for Grammarly
By Cristina Schreil
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· 9 min read
Editor's note
Hi! I’m Sarah Lai (Brand Writer and Blog Editor at Coda), and for the past 10 months, it’s been an honor to steward the Coda blog. With Coda joining Grammarly, an exciting new journey begins. Today’s final blog post—fittingly, a guest entry from one of our Grammarly teammates—marks the end of a chapter, but not the story. This is our thank-you and a celebration of the voices, ideas, and spirit that have helped make this space so special. We’re becoming one team, one company—and soon, one blog. Stay with us as we build what’s next, together. In the meantime, you’ll find us at Grammarly's business blog, where the future of productivity is taking shape.
5 reasons I used Coda to create a stronger style guide for Grammarly
Cristina Schreil, Senior Standards Editor at GrammarlyWhat is a style guide?
But first, what exactly is a style guide? A style guide is a document with guidance on how to create content for a particular company, brand, or publication. Think of it as a rule book for “How to write like Company X.” Style guides ensure we show up consistently on brand. It can even go beyond this, ensuring language is inclusive, empathetic, and overall meets our users where they are. As a result, a brand’s external presence feels seamless and solid. As Grammarly’s Senior Standards Editor, my core role is to support a team of brilliant creators in forging their best work. A style guide answers any questions people in the company may have as they embark on each assignment. Without it, you’d be surprised at how easy it is for writing processes and editorial systems to get derailed. A style guide also helps a team feel better at work—to feel resourced and able to tap into that flow state. This is because someone has already sweated the small stuff, like how we style dashes, how we treat fragments, or even if we can use terms like “dogfooding” for general audiences (we don’t) or American idioms for global audiences (we don’t).For a style guide to be essential, it should evolve.
A style guide is never static. It must evolve just as a company does. Which is exactly why at Grammarly, I’m always looking for better tools to help our fast-moving company. This meant that in the years since taking it over in 2020, I moved it from a document to a wiki and even experimented with other brand-asset management platforms. (I also help connect our style guide document to the style guide feature in our product that our enterprise users know well.) As Grammarly evolved into a leading AI tool for enterprises, I updated our style guide with new product language, inclusive terminology (in collaboration with our amazing linguists and content designers), and detailed formatting for emerging content types. But as the doc grew, so did its challenges. We needed smarter search, more flexible settings, and a smoother overall experience—especially for a team living in it daily. Then Grammarly acquired Coda. Diving into Coda’s tools, I found the capabilities I'd always wanted: nimble settings, advanced features, and a more intuitive interface. The next evolution of our style guide practically wrote itself.Getting started in Coda.
Have you ever downloaded an app or tried a new tool and thought, “This is great, but...” Or, “You know what would make this even better? If it could do this.” There were also times when I wanted a better way for my colleagues to search for terms. I discovered that one person looking for comma guidance would go to “punctuation” first, and another would look under “C” for “commas.” Was there a better way to solve this problem without having to cross-link everything everywhere? I had these sentiments over the years when I was building and working with other platforms for our style guide. I wished my document could somehow have a magic setting or that one platform would have a feature that just didn’t exist. With Coda, I was thrilled to discover that all those features I’d been wishing for were possible. Let me share with you 5 of my favorite features I discovered while building our style guide in Coda.1. Intuitive organization and easy navigation in large documents.
First, I laid out our style guide in a table. It’s easy to get around in Coda, and I quickly came to appreciate the settings for table filters and searching through data. I knew the style guide was big and that it would need room to grow, especially as Grammarly and Coda have joined forces. The bulk of our shared guide lives in a Coda table with over 1000+ rows, which would be unwieldy and inefficient in every other spreadsheet software I’ve tried. In Coda, that’s still an easily searchable, quick-loading doc. It enables you to hone in quickly on that one rule you’re looking for. What’s nice is one person can filter—but those filters don’t affect my view or others’ views. There are many possible filters allowing writers and editors to access terms and libraries quickly.2. Flexible formatting and conscious locking.
With the platforms housing our old style guides, I was always butting heads with rigid formatting rules. Sometimes it felt like trying to insert a photo into a doc circa 2005. One wrong move and all that careful organization was toast. Someone could be viewing the guide and make a couple of accidental keystrokes. Suddenly it’s not saying “Grammarly” but “Grammarlownc3PXP.” Chaos. Panic. In the distance, sirens. This is why I appreciate Coda’s locking feature, where even those with edit access have to do an intentional unlocking before changes are made in the doc.3. No lags on loading huge documents.
Coda gets more done faster so I can get more done faster. As I mentioned earlier, this style guide is a huge document that is constantly growing. It’s simply not that useful if it slows down the computers of everyone who tries to access it. Caffeinated brand writers and a slow-loading style guide are not an ideal mix. With Coda, you can build tables on tables on tables and have them talk to each other while siphoning specific data for specific viewers. Let’s say you’re not building a style guide but a team tracker; individual team members can easily go in to map their progress while also seeing a holistic view of the entire hub. Even with multiple layers and data updating at all times, there’s not a significant lag.4. Intuitive collaboration.
When it came to formatting, our previous style guide iterations were on platforms that were quite touchy. Drop one thing into the wrong spot, and you could accidentally reorient everything else. There were lots of weird things going on when it came to refining copy—inconsistent spacing, bullet points breaking unexpectedly, and difficulty managing large blocks of text. As you can imagine, this got frustrating quickly, especially when you consider how collaborative this doc was supposed to be. Sometimes, I’d be trying to edit something at the same time as someone else, and we’d be messing up each other’s formatting. It was like being in a bike race and competing with each other for space.