Content guidelines
How Clinia writes: the voice, the house style in English and French, and how public content gets approved.
DraftUnder review. It may change before sign-off.
Every word Clinia publishes sounds like one company, whether it sits in a help article, the developer documentation, or a LinkedIn post. This page sets the voice, the house style in English and French, and how public content is written and approved.
Product apps aren't held to this page. They show little text, and their copy follows each component's rules, such as a Button's verb-first label.
Voice
Clinia's voice is C.A.R.E. Confident and Efficient lead; Real and Accessible come in depending on the reader.
- Confident: expert and declarative, never arrogant.
- Accessible: the reader's language. Technical for developers, plain for everyone else.
- Real: specific and human, without hollow enthusiasm.
- Efficient: short sentences, with a longer one now and then for rhythm.
The clinia-brand-voice skill applies the voice, Clinia's approved messaging, and its product names. It's one of Clinia's enterprise skills, available to everyone by default.
Public content
Help articles, the developer documentation, blog posts, LinkedIn posts, release notes, and web copy all go through marketing before they're published. Nina, in marketing, owns the process.
Write it with the skill
The clinia-writing skill writes or rewrites a piece and prepares it for review, on top of clinia-brand-voice:
- Brief: who reads it, what they came for, and a source for every fact.
- Draft: in English, French, or both. The French is written from the brief, not translated word for word.
- Checks: a gate flags spelling, punctuation, and patterns that read as machine-written. Two reviews follow: one for the voice, one for whether the reader gets what they came for.
- Fact check: every claim is traced to its source, or listed for someone to confirm.
- Review packet: the text, the changes made, and the facts to confirm, ready for marketing.
The skill is in Claude Desktop for everyone at Clinia. To add it yourself, download the skill and upload it under Skills in Claude Desktop's settings, or open the clinia/ui repository in Claude Code, where it ships in .claude/skills/clinia-writing.
Get it approved
Post the draft and its review packet in #content-review. Marketing approves there, and only an approved piece is published. A piece written without the skill goes through the same channel.
House style
| English | French | |
|---|---|---|
| Spelling | Canadian: colour, centre, behaviour, organize | OQLF usage |
| Lists | A comma before the last "and" or "or": search, generation, and action | No comma before « et » |
| Headings | Sentence case | A capital on the first word only |
| Punctuation | No em dashes, no exclamation marks | No space before ; ! ?, a non-breaking space before : and inside « » |
| Numbers | Zero to nine in words, 10 and up in numerals | 10 000, 3,5, 50 % |
| Dates and times | October 6, 2026, 2:30 p.m. | le 6 octobre 2026, 14 h 30 |
| Terms | healthcare, Montreal, email | soins de santé, Montréal, courriel |
| The reader | you | vous |
| UI labels | In bold, exactly as on screen | In bold, in English, as the Console shows them |
Interface copy
Words in Clinia products follow the same voice. The copy rules for each pattern live with the pattern:
- Forms and validation: labels, optional fields, and error messages.
- Empty states: what to say when there's nothing yet.
- Loading: what to say while the user waits.
- Destructive actions: confirmations that name what is lost.
Do and Don't
Do
- Lead with what the reader came for.
- Give the specific: the number, the name, the step.
- Name a source for every claim. A claim without one goes to marketing as a question.
Don't
- Use em dashes, "not just X, but Y", or superlatives such as "the leading".
- Fill a gap with a detail that sounds right.
- Publish before marketing approves it in #content-review.