# Style guides

A style guide tells Workover AI how your team writes, so you stop repeating it in every brief. It is a list of short rules that every AI draft, revision and style check follows.

**Before you start:** Your workspace needs an AI provider chosen under **Settings** > **AI**, either **Workover AI** (included with a paid plan) or **Your own key**. See [Choose who provides Workover AI](/docs/choose-ai-provider/). Any workspace member can add rules; guests cannot.

## Two levels

**Workspace rules** describe how your company writes: voice, spelling conventions, the words you use for your own concepts, the things you never say. They apply to every project in the workspace.

**Project rules** describe how one project writes, on top of the workspace rules. A developer docs project and a marketing blog belong to the same company and do not sound the same.

You do not have to repeat workspace rules inside a project. Workover combines both lists into one set of rules for each document. The two levels have no order of precedence: if a project rule contradicts a workspace rule, both are sent and the model has to choose. When a project needs to differ, turn off or reword the workspace rule rather than adding a contradicting one.

## Add or change a rule

### Workspace rules

1. Go to **Settings** > **Style guide**.
2. Type the rule in **Add a workspace style rule…** and press **Enter**, or select the **+** button.
3. To pause a rule without deleting it, use the toggle beside it. To remove it, select the trash icon.

### Project rules

1. Open any document in the project.
2. Select **Edit panel** in the document toolbar, then the AI tab (the arrow-pointer icon).
3. Select **Rules**.
4. Type the rule in **Add a rule for this project…** and press **Enter**, or select the **+** button.

The **Rules** list shows workspace and project rules together, each labeled with its scope. You can turn project rules on and off and delete them here. Workspace rules are read-only in this list; select **Manage the workspace style guide →** to change them.

## Check a document against the guide

Adding a rule does not rewrite existing documents. To see where a document breaks the rules:

1. Open the document, select **Edit panel** in the document toolbar, then the AI tab.
2. Select **Check**, then **Check document**.
3. Review the findings. Where a finding offers **Suggest fix**, select it to add the fix to the document as a tracked suggestion, then accept or reject it in the document.

The check also flags common writing habits that stop prose doing its job, where they matter for that kind of document.

## What to put in one

The things you correct over and over in review:

- **Voice.** “Plain, direct, second person. No exclamation marks. Contractions are fine.”
- **Spelling and conventions.** British or American. Oxford comma or not. How you write numbers, dates and units.
- **Your vocabulary.** What you call your own features, and how they are capitalized. The words you refuse, such as “leverage”, “utilize” or “seamless”.
- **Structure.** “Lead with the problem, not a definition.” “Every how-to ends with a Related section.”
- **Claims.** What you may not say about performance, security or competitors.

Concrete beats abstract. “Never say ‘simply’ or ‘just’, because it makes a reader who is stuck feel stupid” is followed. “Be friendly but professional” is not.

## Keeping it useful

Add to it from review. When you make the same correction twice, that correction belongs in the guide. A guide built this way stays short and useful; one written in a single sitting is long and mostly ignored.

Workover AI also learns from feedback on its own suggestions: when you ask it to revise a suggestion with the same instruction twice, that instruction becomes a rule. Those learned rules are listed separately under **Settings** > **AI** > **What Workover AI has learned**, so you can always tell a rule a person wrote from one Workover inferred.

## Agents use the same guide

Coding agents and scripts that use the Workover CLI or MCP server read the same rules. `workover rules list` and `workover rules export` print them, and `workover rules add` adds one (sign in with `workover login --rules` to change rules). See [CLI commands and MCP tools](/docs/cli-and-mcp-reference/).

## Related

- [Writing a good brief](/docs/writing-a-good-brief/)
- [How Workover AI works](/docs/ai-drafting-overview/)
- [Revising a document with AI](/docs/iterating-on-a-draft/)
- [Core concepts](/docs/core-concepts/)