Thursday, September 24, 2009

Style Guide in Technical Writing

As technical writers, you are often asked to create or refer to style guides? Why? Style guides can help in improving document quality and in standardizing document presentation. For example what is correct - 5 or five? Style guides can help you decide this. Let’s understand the basics of style guides.


What?

Style Guide is a set of standards that highlights the preferred writing style, punctuation, spelling, and formatting used for various publications by an organization. You can refer to industry-accepted style guides or create your own in-house guide.


Why?

  • Consistency – Ensures consistent and uniform look of all publications, thus enabling readers to seek information with better ease and speed. For example, if you are using American English, you will make sure you write “analyze” and not “analyse” throughout your document though both are grammatically correct spellings.
  • Easy Writing and Editing – It is easy to create or review a document if the writing rules are already clarified. You can refer them any point in time to make sure you are using the correct format.
  • Effective and Fair Writing – Adherence to style guide helps to create neutral and effective publications regardless of each author’s personal writing style. For example, you will follow the capitalization rules as specified in the style guide instead of your own way.

Examples:

2 comments:

Meena Kadem said...

It is really very helpful.. Thank you Ma'm!

Meena Kadem said...

Its really worth! Thanks for sharing....