Setting up your Styleguide

• Contents

• Brand voice
• Formality
• Liveliness
• Gender Tone
• Plain language
• Writing style
• Capitalization
• Punctuation
• Date and numbers
• Emoji
• Social media
• Spelling
• Spell check
• Name entity detection
• Grammar
• Plagiarism
• Compliance
• Hate speech detection
• Data Loss Prevention
• Global compliance detection
• Score
• Calculating score
• Quality category calculation
• Weighting category scores
• Linking a Styleguide
• Custom Pages

When you create a new Workspace, Qordoba automatically sets up a Styleguide. You will need to customize it to match your desired writing/style guidelines that align with your brand.

To access your Styleguide, click Styleguide in the menu.

In Styleguide > Introduction, fill out the Styleguide name, select an Audience, and write a Description, then click Save changes.

Once in your Styleguide, you will be able to edit the following categories.

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Brand voice

Qordoba has identified key factors that define a brand’s voice. Using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Deep Learning, Qordoba measures your content against your preferences to ensure your content conforms with your organizational identity.

You can set the Formality and Liveliness of your content, and select if and when Qordoba detects Gender Tone in your content.

To get started, click Edit.To change the formality or liveliness of your brand voice, turn on the corresponding switch, then drag the slider to the desired point. As you drag, you’ll see examples of content formality/liveliness level and content that would get flagged as off-brand.

(a) Formality

Based on your selections, Qordoba can detect how formal/informal the content in your Workspace is and flag off-brand language.

Formal writing tends to be complex— it has a more varied vocabulary and uses longer sentences. Formal writing also uses more advanced words, punctuation, and avoids abbreviations. Informal writing, on the other hand, tends to be more emotional and use more colloquial language. Neither style is inherently better.

 

(b) Liveliness

Qordoba can detect how lively/reserved your content is and flag off-brand language. 

Reserved voices use third-person pronouns, short sentences, and passive voice. Lively voices use first- and second-person pronouns, emojis, and evocative, emotional language.

  

(c) Gender Tone

If you want to avoid gender bias in your content, Qordoba can help you flag gender-non-inclusive language. It can also flag implicit and explicit masculine/feminine words. 

What are implicit and explicit masculine/feminine words?

Though some words clearly have a gendered meaning — aunt, uncle, postman, actress, etc. — many other words have gendered connotations based on the context. For example, "nurse" does not have an explicit reference to gender, but from the context it tends to show up in (e.g. "She is my favorite nurse"), gender is often inferred. By analyzing context, we identify implicitly and explicitly gendered language to help you get a deeper understanding of your messaging.

 

Select/unselect the checkmarks that correspond to what you want flagged in your workspace.

  

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Plain language

Plain language is a set of writing guidelines that help make your content easier for your audience to understand.

Before: The patient is being given positive-pressure ventilatory support.

After: The patient is on a respirator.

 

Qordoba checks to ensure your writers:

• Use familiar words
• Write short sentences
• Avoid large gaps between the subject, verb, and object
• Use base verbs, not hidden verbs

To learn more about plain language, check out the U.S. federal guidelines.

To decide whether or not your content should adhere to plain language guidelines, turn on the switch.

 

 

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Writing style

Writing style settings include the rules around your content’s mechanics, including capitalization, punctuation, date and numbers, emojis, and social media.

To make edits to any section, make sure the section has been turned on. By default, all sections should be turned on when you access your Styleguide for the first time.

(a) Capitalization

Qordoba provides capitalization rules that are mostly enabled by default but can be enabled/disabled individually. There are 11 preset rules enabled.

To enable a rule, check the corresponding checkbox. To disable, uncheck it.

To view additional, less common rules, click Show advanced rules.

In addition, certain rules will include dropdown menus to select an option. As you select an option, the below example dynamically changes.

 

(b) Punctuation

Qordoba provides a group of Punctuation rules that are enabled by default but can be enabled/disabled individually. There are 22 preset rules enabled for the following types of features:

• Apostrophes ( ' )
• Ampersands ( & )
• Contractions (don't, won't)
• Colons and semicolons ( : ; )
• Commas ( , )
• Dashes and hyphens ( - , — )
• Ellipses ( ... )
• Exclamation marks ( ! )
• Parentheses ( () )
• Percentages ( % )
• Periods ( . )
• Quotation marks ( " " )

To enable a rule, check the corresponding checkbox. To disable, uncheck it.

Like Capitalization, certain rules will include dropdown menus to select an option. As you select an option, the rule's example dynamically changes.

 

(c) Date and numbers 

Qordoba provides default Date and numbers rules, but they can be enabled/disabled as match your company’s standards. There are 19 preset rules enabled for the following types of features:

• Currencies and money
• Dates, months, and years
• Time and timezones
• Numbers, fractions, and units

To enable a rule, check the corresponding checkbox. To disable, uncheck it.

 

Like Capitalization and Punctuation, certain rules will include dropdown menus to select an option. As you select an option, the rule's dynamically changes.

 

(d) Emoji

You can note in your Styleguide when it's appropriate to use emojis. To enable, turn on the switch.

Qordoba can also flag specific emojis in your writing. To enable, select the rule and click the field to view/select emojis. To remove an emoji from the selection, click the corresponding x.

(e) Social media

If your brand formats social media handles or hashtags a certain way, Qordoba can help flag improper variants. All three preset rules have been automatically enabled.

 

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Spelling

(a) Spell check

Qordoba will help proofread your content by checking all spelling against our proprietary database.

If you want Qordoba to check for special brand terminology, you can do so by using a Term Bank. To learn more, go to Term Bank. To enable/disable Spell check, toggle the switch.

 

 

(b) Name entity detection

To enable/disable Named entity detection, toggle the switch.

Once enabled, you can select the following categories to be included/excluded from Qordoba's Spell check. By default, all categories are enabled once you’ve turned on named entity detection, but the switches can be turned on or off individually.

• Person (Example: Jimmy Fallon)
• Organization (Example: New York Knicks)
• Event (Example: Consumer Electronics Show)
• Work of art (Example: Mona Lisa)
• Consumer goods (Example: iPhone)
• Other (Example: Wall Street Journal)

  

 

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Grammar 

Qordoba's Styleguide catches errors and provides feedback using the company's Grammar Error Correction (GEC) machine learning model. 

 

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Plagiarism

Plagiarism detection is the process of locating instances of plagiarism within a workspace or document. Qordoba’s plagiarism feature analyzes Workspace content against Google Search API's to flag plagiarized content. Content is checked for similarity with the given text query and results are displayed for writers in Qordoba immediately.

To enable/disable the ability to check content against the web for plagiarism, toggle the switch. 

If there are certain URLs that you want to exclude from your plagiarism search, use the field to add your whitelisted URLs (and click + Add URL to add additional URLs). If Qordoba finds your content featured on these sites, we will not count the content as plagiarized.

If you need to remove one of the URLs, click the minus icon. 

 

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Compliance

Compliance provides options around flagging content that goes against general policies your company has in regards to hate speech, data loss prevention, and/or global compliance detection. 

 

(a) Hate speech detection

Qordoba can flag various types of hate speech, which you can select by checking the corresponding boxes:

 

(b) Data Loss Prevention (DLP)

Qordoba can flag content that's considered sensitive or critical. Based on your industry or content that will be managed in Qordoba, you can select which entities that you want us to flag.

(c) Global compliance detection

Qordoba offers the capability to flag potentially sensitive information based on countries. If there are certain types of content for a specific country that are of concern to your company, select the corresponding checkboxes.

 

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Score

When you check within Qordoba Content Editor, you can see a Score for the document on the right-hand menu. The content score expresses the average of all category scores as a standardized score out of 100. The higher the score, the higher the quality of the content. You can influence how the Score is calculated by configuring the weight of each category.

(a) Calculating score

Scores help you to quantify the quality of a document and compare it with other documents. The score expresses the overall quality of your content as a number between 1 and 100, with 100 being highest. You also get score breakdowns for how well your content complies with each section of your style guide, such as spelling or style. The overall score is an average of your individual category scores.

Note: Plagiarism is not factored into your score, Qordoba only measures your score on the quality of the content.

 

(b) Quality category calculation

 Each individual quality category is calculated according to the following formula:

Normalized document length / (Normalized document length + issue count)

This formula contains the following variables:

• Document length: The number of words in the document.
• Normalized document length: The number of words in the document divided by a factor of 75.
• Issue count: The number of issues that Qordoba found in the quality category, such as spelling.

The following table shows you what the calculation steps would be for a document with 1000 words and 12 spelling issues.

 

Step	Calculation	Result
1. Calculate the normalized document length	1000 / 75	13.33
2. Add the normalized document length and the issue count	13.33 + 12	25.33
3. Divide the normalized document length by the result of the previous step	13.33 / 25.33	0.5263
4. Express the result as a percentage and round it to the nearest whole number	0.5263 * 100	53

 

(c) Weighting category scores

You can configure Qordoba to increase or decrease the influence that a category score has on your content score. Weighting a category helps writers prioritize the issues to correct in a document.

For example, suppose that want to encourage writers to remove all spelling issues in a document before addressing other issues. You can set the weighting for the spelling category to 100 and decrease other categories. This way, the spelling category score counts for much more than flags in any other category.

 

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Linking a Styleguide

In order for your content to be scored against your Styleguide, you will need to link a Styleguide to your Workspace.

To link the Styleguide, click Workspaces > Workspace Settings, scroll to the bottom of the page to see each audience for the workspace as well as the Content Memory and Term Bank. 

 Click the cog icon to the right of the audience, click Edit, and choose the Styleguide you wish to tie to the particular audience. 

  

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Custom Pages

You can create a Custom Page within your Styleguide to capture additional details  about your brand, voice, and style guidelines. Click + New custom page to get started.

Type a title and your custom page's text in the corresponding fields. Click Save changes to create your custom page.

After you've saved your custom page, the title will appear on your left hand menu. To delete the page, click ... > Delete.

 

To read about sharing your Styleguide, please continue to Sharing your Styleguide.

To read about how to create custom rules for your Styleguide, please continue to Creating a Custom Rule.