---
title: "Writing Style Guides for Better UIs"
description: "A user interface gets noticeably better when you hand your coding agent a writing style guide and tell it to apply the whole thing to every string. Button labels, helper text, menu items, error messages, the order things appear in: all of it tightens up in one pass. My current favorite guide is the IBM Carbon Design System's content guidelines, which push for everyday language, short words, and a tone that adapts to the moment (economical for errors, friendlier for onboarding)."
url: https://ai.statico.io/2026/07/14/writing-style-guides-for-better-uis/
canonical: https://ai.statico.io/2026/07/14/writing-style-guides-for-better-uis/
date: 2026-07-14T16:16:10.000Z
last_updated: 2026-07-14T16:16:10.000Z
doc_version: 2026-07-14
tags: ["agents", "ai", "coding-agents", "prompt-engineering", "tooling", "web"]
ai_disclosure: ai-assisted
---

# Writing Style Guides for Better UIs

A user interface gets noticeably better when you hand your coding agent a writing style guide and tell it to apply the whole thing to every string. Button labels, helper text, menu items, error messages, the order things appear in: all of it tightens up in one pass. My current favorite guide is the [IBM Carbon Design System's content guidelines](https://carbondesignsystem.com/guidelines/content/overview/), which push for everyday language, short words, and a tone that adapts to the moment (economical for errors, friendlier for onboarding).

![Carbon Design System Content guidelines page with sidebar menu and overview tab displaying writing principles](/media/1784044606757-0d46c4bcdb8fc62e.png)

## Why this is a good job for an agent

A lot of this used to be slow, committee-shaped work. Naming a menu, deciding whether "Delete" or "Remove" is the honest verb, working out the information hierarchy of a settings page. Hours of deliberation, sometimes days. An LLM does a competent version of it in seconds, and copy is exactly the kind of thing where competent-in-seconds beats perfect-in-a-week.

## How to wire it up

Point the agent at the guide and say "apply this writing style guide to all user-facing text." The Carbon [writing-style source file](https://github.com/carbon-design-system/carbon-website/blob/main/src/pages/guidelines/content/writing-style.mdx) is right there on GitHub, so you can feed it the raw MDX. Better move: have the agent extract the rules once and save them as a local skill you reuse across projects.

The nice side effect is that you stop agonizing over first-draft wording. Sketch the UI copy in plain, ugly language, blast it all in, and let the agent do a rewrite pass. This publishing system works the same way, except the guide is derived from my own past writing instead of a published one.

[The Elements of Style](https://github.com/obra/the-elements-of-style) is another good option, Strunk's 1918 text packaged as a Claude Code plugin. I haven't used it yet, but people keep telling me it's worth installing.

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