Category: Style

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The Fundamentals of Technical Communication: Throw Out Your Thesaurus and Pick Up a Style Guide

by Chelsea Fulton

Consumers of technical content are hardly a captive audience. Typically, our readers need help setting up a product and troubleshooting errors. Rarely, if ever, do technical content consumers browse our websites and white papers for entertainment. Our consumers are purpose-driven. Therefore, technical content creators must be accurate, explicit, concise, and consistent.

  • According to Demand Metric, consistently presented brands are 3 to 4 times more likely to experience brand visibility.
  • A study by Marq determined that consistently presenting a brand can increase a company’s average revenue by 10-20%.
  • BBC News found that one spelling mistake can cut online sales in half.​ 

The bottom line is that consistency and quality matter.

Consistency is one of the fundamental differences between technical writing and other writing styles. Effective technical communication is uniform. The margin of interpretation for technical content should be next to non-existent. So, how does a team of 15 technical writers tasked with creating and maintaining hundreds of documents write in a way that is indistinguishable to an untrained eye?

An internal style guide, that’s how.

Continue reading “The Fundamentals of Technical Communication: Throw Out Your Thesaurus and Pick Up a Style Guide”
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Coming Soon: The STC TESIG Editors’ Exchange 2023 Mini-Conference!

The goal of the STC Technical Editing SIG (TESIG) is to provide its members with high quality information about editing processes and best practices, as well as resources that demonstrate the value of editing and editors in an organization.

To meet this goal, we are happy to announce EdEx23, an online mini-conference dedicated to the field of technical editing and to technical editing practitioners.

EdEx23 will be held on 14 November 2023 from 8:45 AM to 12:00 PM ET (for your local time, go to https://tinyurl.com/cw228pyx). Come hear the following fascinating speakers:

  • Chelsea Fulton will be presenting a session called “Write It Right: Implementing a Global Style Guide“.
  • Fatima Hyder will be speaking about “Technical Editors – What Are They Good For?“.
  • Leah Guren will talk about “Don’t Touch That Doc ’til You’ve Had the Talk!”.

We especially encourage students and new technical editing practitioners to join us!

To see details about the presentations and to purchase tickets for EdEx23, go to https://tinyurl.com/35w7ae8p.

The price of the tickets is for the entire mini-conference, and attendees can join at any time. All sessions will be recorded, and the recordings and slides will be made available to attendees after the mini-conference.

EdEx23 attendees who are STC members can earn up to 2 CEUs for the full half-day program. For credit, submit a request for CEUs to certification@stc.org.

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Of Interest: STC Education Online Course – Creating and Using a Department Style Guide

Wednesdays, 13 September to 1 November 2023  at 6:30 to 7:30 PM ET
(click here for your time zone)

Instructor: The TESIG’s own Kelly Schrank!

Registration closes 12 September 2023

Whether building a new department, working as a department of one, or joining a new or existing department, many technical communicators have found themselves working on documents without the benefit of a style guide.

In this course, as a group we will create a new style guide from scratch, incorporate common elements, and decide together what’s needed and what might be better relegated to other documents or resources. From grammar and punctuation to style and formatting, we’ll go through the process together. We’ll tackle this as the big project it is, by planning its scope and schedule, including tracking status, training others, and gathering feedback.

After the course, everyone will be emailed the finished document in Microsoft Word to use as is or as a template for their own style guide.

  • STC Members: $375
  • Gold Members: $300
  • Student Members: $295
  • Nonmembers: $595

To register, go to https://www.stc.org/course/creating-and-using-a-department-style-guide-september-2023/.

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Of Interest: Style Guides: Love ‘Em, Hate ‘Em, Gotta Have ‘Em! (Workshop Pt. 2)

On 20 June 2023, at 12 PM ET (click here for your local time), join the TESIG’s own style guide “agony aunt”, Marcia Shannon, as she presents part 2 of her workshop on how to deal with all sorts of style-guide-related issues.
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/style-guides-love-em-hate-em-gotta-have-em-workshop-pt-2-tickets-595873251937?aff=oddtdtcreator

If you missed part 1, no worries! You can get tickets for it here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/style-guides-love-em-hate-em-gotta-have-em-pt-1-recording-tickets-569029962937

This is a joint event between the TESIG and the STC Carolina chapter. It is open to both STC members and non-members. It is free for TESIG/STC Carolina members, and available at a small charge for non-members. It will be recorded, and the recordings, slides, and handouts will be available for a year afterwards.

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This Worked for Me: How to Create an Internal Style Guide that Users Will Follow

by Chelsea Fulton

Part 1: Welcome! Now, please memorize all of this.

I started my technical communications career in 2011. I was hired to document a new Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system for the contact center of a Fortune 50 company, and my new team had an existing style guide. For a long time, our style guide was a one-page HTML document that outlined frequently used documentation processes and even included sections of code that users could easily copy/paste directly into drafted content. This style guide version worked well for a team of 4–5 people. However, the CRM system transition project and adding several new technical writers meant we needed more extensive documentation guidelines.

Continue reading “This Worked for Me: How to Create an Internal Style Guide that Users Will Follow”