You Need a Style Guide
I'm really excited about this, because I just embraced the smiley-face emoticon.
BuzzFeed now has its own style guide, as noted by Megan Garber of The Atlantic with notable condescension. To be fair, though, it is pretty slipshod work if you put together a guide that lets writers overrule you if anything "looks weird" to them.
The point is that if BuzzFeed can have a style guide, so can you. No matter how small your organization, you'll have a lot of writing to do. Figure out whether you use Ph.D. or PhD, use serial commas, and accept smiley-face emoticons in e-mails (and, for that matter, whether you write it e-mail or email). It'll save you a lot of time and embarrassment.
BuzzFeed now has its own style guide, as noted by Megan Garber of The Atlantic with notable condescension. To be fair, though, it is pretty slipshod work if you put together a guide that lets writers overrule you if anything "looks weird" to them.
The point is that if BuzzFeed can have a style guide, so can you. No matter how small your organization, you'll have a lot of writing to do. Figure out whether you use Ph.D. or PhD, use serial commas, and accept smiley-face emoticons in e-mails (and, for that matter, whether you write it e-mail or email). It'll save you a lot of time and embarrassment.