Drafting manuals and style guides

What it is

A drafting manual is a book telling the people who write and translate for one organization how to word things. It is neither law nor usage but a third kind of warrant, and it is the kind most often cited without having been read.

The family is not uniform. Its members differ in what they claim about themselves, in whom they address, and in whether they concede that a drafter may depart from them. Those differences are printed in the documents rather than inferred from them.

Two boundaries. The wording a guide prescribes belongs here; the notation it prescribes, meaning dates, figures, currency, capitalization and punctuation, belongs among conventions and is cited here rather than settled here. And where a guide governs one class of unit, the record for that class keeps it: how an instrument is cited, how a preamble opens, how obligation is worded. What is left is the guides themselves and the question of reach.

Where the fixity comes from

Four statements, each made by a document about itself.

• The Joint Practical Guide calls itself a platform of general drafting principles, used by each institution alongside other instruments carrying specific standard formulations and more detailed practical rules, and intended for everyone involved in drafting the commonest types of act.
• The Interinstitutional Agreement of 1998, whose guidelines the Guide carries forward, is blunter about status: the guidelines are to be regarded as instruments for internal use by the institutions, and they are not legally binding.
• The Commission's English Style Guide addresses English-language authors and translators, in-house and freelance, working for the Commission. Style there means a set of accepted linguistic conventions, so recommended in-house usage rather than literary style; it names the Interinstitutional Style Guide and the Joint Practical Guide among the resources it draws together, and says it does not aim to replace them.
• The Office of the Parliamentary Counsel writes for members of that office. Members are asked to have regard to the guidance, everything in it is subject to the requirement that drafts be accurate and effective, and the guidance states in its own words that it follows that there will be departures.

Nothing is quoted here from the Interinstitutional Style Guide, whose official text did not open; it is named because the Commission's guide names it and positions itself against it. Each of these moves when its body revises its own guidance, which is what the Institutional value means.

Consequences for translation

Four documents from two jurisdictions disagree about how much they bind, and that disagreement is the record's practical content.

• The same wording carries a different warrant depending on which document prescribes it, and a reviser who cites the wrong one has cited nothing.
• A guideline number belongs to an edition. Manuals renumber, so a number attached to the wrong edition is a defect rather than a typo.
• Guidance reaches the texts of the house that issues it. Applied to a contract or to another body's act it is a suggestion, and the documents quoted above say so themselves.
• Where a client states a house style that is the warrant for the job, and where none is stated the instrument's own version is.
• The notation these guides settle is a conventions matter. One provision of one directive prints a fixed sum of EUR 40 in English against 40 EUR in German and French: the code moves, and that is cited here rather than found here.

Examples

EN>NL

• Source: The terminology used in a given act shall be consistent both internally and with acts already in force
• Target: De gebruikte terminologie dient coherent te zijn, en dit zowel binnen de bepalingen van eenzelfde besluit als ten opzichte van die van reeds geldende besluiten
• Comment: Interinstitutional Agreement of 22 December 1998, Guideline 6, English and Dutch versions. This is the sentence the Joint Practical Guide carries as its own Guideline 6, and the same document says its guidelines are for internal use and not legally binding. What fixes the pair is therefore a text prescribing wording for one set of drafters while declaring that it binds nobody in law.

EN>FR

• Source: Identical concepts shall be expressed in the same terms
• Target: Les mêmes concepts sont exprimés par les mêmes termes
• Comment: Same guideline, French version. The requirement that identical concepts be expressed in identical terms is not itself expressed in identical terms across the versions carrying it, so quoting the English at a French-language drafter points at a document that exists, for that reader, in another shape.

References

• Interinstitutional Agreement of 22 December 1998 on common guidelines for the quality of drafting of Community legislation, Guideline 6 and the paragraph on the status of the guidelines. Official Journal of the European Communities C 73, 17 March 1999, pp. 1 to 4. English, Dutch and French language versions.
• Joint Practical Guide of the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission for persons involved in the drafting of European Union legislation, 2015 edition. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union. Guideline 6, at pp. 20 to 21.
• English Style Guide: A handbook for authors and translators in the European Commission, eighth edition, January 2016, last updated November 2025. European Commission.
• Interinstitutional Style Guide. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union, 2022 edition. Cited by edition; no wording is taken from it on this page.
• Office of the Parliamentary Counsel (2024). Drafting Guidance, March 2024 edition. London: Office of the Parliamentary Counsel, at p. 1.
• Directive 2011/7/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 16 February 2011 on combating late payment in commercial transactions (recast), Article 6(1), English, German and French language versions.