Melanie Flanders
If you are writing documentation, there is also a need for a style guide, especially when documents have multiple authors. A style guide fosters consistency among writers and across documents and provides editors with a written set of guidelines by which they can instill consistency. The style guide can end disputes among writers, editors, and subject matter experts that arise over consistency issues in documentation.
Style guides are also useful as a training aid for new employees because the guide contains a written source of rules, regulations, and best practices. Typically, a style guide also outlines the documentation and production process.
New writers can generate documents with less direct supervision, which frees the manager or other writers to work on other tasks. Most style guides include sections on document development, formats and specifications, and language usage. The style guide can cover the entire format of finished documents so that nothing is left open for argument.
Document development includes the production cycle and an overview of the writing process, such as planning, organizing, writing, and revising.
Formats and specifications includes rules for and examples of the various documents that a corporation generates. These sections include elements such as margins, typeface, type size, levels of headings, numbering systems, and graphic presentations.
The language usage section can contain references to an existing commercial third-party style guide such as The New York Public Library Writer’s Guide to Style and Usage, the Government Printing Office Style Manual, the Chicago Manual of Style, The Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual, or the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 4th ed. Since these are all excellent style guides, why reinvent the wheel? Choose one, cite it, and move on.
In this section of your style guide, include only those items that are unique to your style or items where you deviate from your commercial style guide of choice. Also reference a dictionary that will serve as the standard for spelling and hyphenation.
In addition to the guidelines that have been developed for printed matter, many online style guidelines have been derived from sources that include principles of screen design from the computer science field, schemata and learner styles from the psychology field, and user preference tests from the technical communication and human factors fields (Nichols, 433).
The process of developing a style guide consists of five steps:
- Gain management support; get buy-in from both management and the users (usually writers).
- Define the audience; know who the users are and target the content accordingly. Be neither condescending nor over their heads.
- Create the style guide. Include the necessary and applicable sections. (For more information on what to include in a style guide, see Technical Editing: The Practical Guide for Editors and Writers, by Judith A. Tarutz, (C) 1992, published by Addison-Wesley.)
- Assemble the style guide, conduct thorough reviews to ensure continued buy-in, and distribute it widely.
- Update the style guide; add new information, new style decisions, or changes to processes or procedures.
If you can get by with a third-party style guide entirely, you will save yourself a lot of work. However, anyone who produces online or printed documentation will need to create formatting standards at a minimum. For actual document production, it is often useful to have templates for writers to use. A self-documenting online template is especially useful, both for printed and online endeavors.
By using a style guide whenever there is a multi-author, multi-work environment, there is some chance that “they shall travel on to where the two shall be as one.”
Melanie G. Flanders, a senior STC member, is chief information architect for Knowledge-Masters, Inc.
Bibliography
- Allen, Paul R. “Save Money with a Corporate Style Guide.” Technical Communication, Journal of the Society for Technical Communication, May 1995, Volume 42, Number 2,
pp. 284-289.
- Gelb, Janice, and Gardiner, Jeffrey J. “Developing a Company Style Guide.” Society for Technical Communication 44th Annual Conference Proceedings. pp. 469-471.
- Nichols, Michelle Corbin. “Using Style Guidelines to Create Consistent Online Information.” Technical Communication, Journal of the Society for Technical Communication, August 1994, Volume 41, Number 3, pp. 432-438