Set up Grammarly style rules for your house style

Example result.

Draft:   NorthGate supplies hydraulic rams to our clients.
Flags:   NorthGate → Northgate · hydraulic rams → cylinders · clients → customers
Result:  Northgate Hydraulics supplies cylinders to our customers.

1. Collect the terms that keep going wrong

Choose one kind of writing, such as support replies. Read a few recent examples for repeated differences in names, capitalisation, abbreviations and terms. Start with about a dozen rules: twelve well-chosen interruptions are respected where a hundred are dismissed. The rest of the style guide can wait. It has managed that quite successfully so far.

If your agreed decisions are scattered, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Copilot can turn them into a review list. Paste only the guide excerpt and examples you’re allowed to share:

Prepare candidate Grammarly style rules for [writing type and team], using only the agreed decisions below.

For each rule give: the original wording, one fixed replacement if appropriate, and a short explanation. Use a separate row for singular and plural forms when their replacements differ. Flag choices that depend on context or first mention for human review. Don't invent preferences or exceptions. List unresolved decisions separately. This is a review list, not an import file.

Agreed decisions:
[guide excerpt and examples]

[writing type and team] might be “customer support replies, support team”. [guide excerpt and examples] is the pasted text.

Why this works: each row is one mapping you can check, and anything uncertain goes to the guide’s owner instead of into Grammarly.

What you should see: about a dozen rows, each traceable to a decision in your guide, plus a short list of open questions.

2. Create the rule set and assign it

Open Style Rule Sets in your Grammarly account and choose Create rule set. Name it for its purpose, such as “Customer support terminology”, choose the organisation or group it applies to, and save. Groups can receive suggestions from several sets, so check for overlap with any existing set and talk to its owner.

Why this works: a set aimed at one team can use that team’s terms without arguing with another team’s.

What you should see: an empty, named rule set assigned to the group that will test it first.

3. Add the first rule, then import the rest

Open the set and choose Add rule:

• Original text: the wording to flag. Press Tab to add variants that need the same replacement.
• Rule text: the preferred replacement. Leave it blank when the writer needs to judge.
• Explanation: why the suggestion exists and when it applies.

Give each word form its own rule. client → customer and clients → customers are two rules. For a name, open Formatting options and turn on Original text is case-sensitive, so the correct Northgate is left alone.

For the rest, choose Import list, download the CSV template, fill it with your checked rows without changing its format, and import it. Open the imported rules and check them.

Why this works: testing one rule before importing eleven means a mistake gets fixed once, not twelve times.

What you should see: your rules listed in the set, each with an explanation.

4. Test in real sentences

In an app your team uses with Grammarly, signed in to an assigned account, try:

1. Wording that should be flagged.
2. The already-correct wording.
3. An exception, such as a customer quotation.
4. Singular, plural and sentence-start versions.

Accept a suggestion and read the whole sentence. If nothing appears, check the assignment, whether the set is active, and its website settings (⋮ › Settings › Show suggestions for this rule set on:).

Why this works: a rule that’s right in isolation can still break grammar or meaning inside a sentence.

What you should see: every wrong form flagged, every correct form left alone, and the explanation visible when a writer hovers.

5. Check what the usage data tells you

After a fortnight, open the set and read the Viewed and Accepted columns for each rule. A rule dismissed fifty times out of fifty isn’t being ignored. It’s telling you the rule is wrong, or that it’s reaching the wrong people. Ask a writer for an example before changing it, and don’t delete a rule just because it’s rarely viewed: a rare term may still matter.

Why this works: the data shows where the rules and the writing disagree, which is where your guide needs a decision.

What you should see: most rules accepted most of the time, and a short list of rules to rescope or rewrite.

Check the result

• Each word form has its own rule, and plurals stay plural.
• Correct spellings and quotations are left alone.
• Every rule has an explanation a new writer would understand.
• The set is assigned to the people who write this kind of text.

The usual failure: one rule tries to cover two word forms, such as “client, clients” mapped to “customer”, so “our clients” becomes “our customer”. Spot it by typing the plural in a test sentence.

Revise only the rows that combine originals needing different replacements. Split them into separate rows. Keep the agreed wording and explanations, add no new rules, and list what you changed.

Run this on the review list from step 1, then fix the affected rules in Grammarly.

Fictional example. Northgate Hydraulics distributes industrial parts. Its support guide wants the full company name first and Northgate afterwards, calls the parts cylinders, and leaves quotations and approved legal text alone. Some of the rules:

• The failure. The first review list had one row: “client, clients → customer”. In testing, “our clients” became “our customer”. The split prompt produced the two rows above.
• What rules can’t do. A rule fixes NorthGate, but it can’t check that the full name appeared first. And “synergies for repeat orders” became “lets customers reuse a saved delivery address” only because a writer found that fact.
• After a fortnight. The client rule was being dismissed by the proposals team, who also had the set and deliberately say “client”. It was reassigned to the support group only, which is a decision the data made obvious.

Task kit for this job: Download (ZIP) · Reusable instructions

Go deeper

Sources

• Grammarly Support: Create style rules
• Grammarly: Style guide FAQ
• Grammarly Support: Customize style rule properties
• Grammarly Support: Create an organizational dictionary
• Grammarly Support: Set brand tones
• Grammarly Support: Manage team member roles
• Grammarly Support: About custom roles
• Grammarly: Plans