Back-to-School Time? Style Guides: A Primer News & Views Feature Article

Jason Langkamer-Smith Jason is a technical writer for QuestOne Decision Sciences (www.questone.com) in Bethlehem. In September 1998, he enrolled in an online, technical communications Master's certificate program at New Jersey Institute of Technology. He learned about style guides by writing a report on the subject for Dr. Michael Kerley's Advanced Technical and Professional Communications class. Email is the best way to contact Jason: jlangkamer_smith@questone.com. Originally published in News & Views November 1999 issue. Copyright 1999 STC-Philadelphia Metro Chapter. For permission to reprint this article, contact the Managing Editor.

You no doubt noticed the fall weather? It must signal back-to-school days. So it's time to question, debate, and learn something new. Here's an article about style guides to satisfy your academic curiosities. But let's avoid the figurative classroom; this article is a working-guy's view about the merits and values of style guides. In it, you'll find the following sections: Understanding style guides Researching and organizing Evaluating project feasibility Developing content Encouraging usage Understanding style guides You can define a style guide many different ways. Here's one of my favorites: "A style guide sets consistency, writing style, and format goals for all types of documents, without restricting creativity," according to Larry Prado, president of The Veridus® Company, Inc. (www.veridus.com). Not all style guides are created equally. Organizations can classify their style standards on a continuum of comprehensiveness. Some need very few standards, so their style guides are less comprehensive; others sell exhaustive style guides on the mass market to people like you and me. At my employer, style standards fall somewhere between informal and project-specific. Our style guide deals with the mechanics of putting together user's guides; we supplement it with various grammar and usage references. Some popular mass-produced style guides for technical writers-particularly software documentation writers--include the Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications and A Style Guide for the Computer Industry by Sun Microsystems. Researching and organizing Once you understand what a style guide is, you might want to begin researching and organizing your own. The STC publication index at www.stc-va.org includes more than twenty entries about style guides. You might start your research by reading a few relevant articles. For example, if you are particularly interested in setting standards for the proper use of your organization's graphic elements, you might read Donald Le Vie's "Graphic Considerations for a Corporate Style Guide", Intercom Vol. 45, Issue 2 (1998): 4-9. Other style guide articles investigate custom templates, user attitudes, and financial savings. Evaluating project feasibility With such a wealth of valuable published information about style guides, you need to find a clear jumping-off point. Bill Sullivan offers the following no-nonsense advice: "Your style guide should address the problems you see. It's as simple as that," he wrote in "How Do I Develop a Style Guide?" Intercom, Vol. 43, Issue 8 (1996): 24-25. But which problems should your style guide address? To me, at least initially, deciding which issues to leave out of our style guide was more challenging than deciding which ones to put in. Unless you see a clear need for your style guide, you might get overwhelmed thinking about all the possible ways you can put it to use. Style guides can grow into training documents or policy manuals. They can exclusively focus on corporate visual identity. They can serve as orientation tools to educate new writers. I think a style guide project is most feasible when it focuses on very specific needs in a timely fashion. My company needed a style guide because (1) we employ five technical writers who work in the United States and India, and (2) we are attempting for the first time in the company's history to write nine software manuals and three help systems, all of which must have the same look and feel. The need was apparent and the timing was right. "Find out how much work is involved and whether there is enough need," James Curtis wrote in "Considering a Corporate Style Guide?" Intercom, Vol. 44, Issue 8 (1997): 22-25. If you pay attention to your needs, then the effort and time put into a style guide project will pay off. Like most writers, we struggled to find time to write and update our style guide. We wrote a good first draft. But it will undergo various revisions as our software documentation project efforts progress. We believe time spent now to carefully improve the guide will return financial savings down the road as the project gains momentum. If our style guide will help us shorten writing time, then we can consider it a moneymaking tool, assuming time is money. "A corporate style guide saves time and is an economical quality control tool, both of which add up to making money-the goal of any corporation," Paul Allen wrote in "Save Money with a Corporate Style Guide." Technical Communication, Vol. 42, Issue 2 (1995): 284-289. Even though a style guide can save money, you might decide the payoff is just not there. A formal style guide project might present too little reward for the perceived effort. Maybe you are a publications manager who can spare only a single writer for the project. Or maybe you are part of a writing team that simply does not have time for an extra project. "Writers in the corporate world just don't have much time to write, produce, and update a style guide," Larry Prado said. In that case, consider collecting informal or unwritten style standards into a series of checklists. Chances are, you can gather a lot of information in a short amount of time. Or, you can contact firms such as The Veridus(r) Company that sell online style guides that are easy to maintain and can be customized to meet your needs. Developing content In its current form, our project-specific style guide contains about fifty pages. We designed the style guide to look like our published software manuals; it is based on the same layout, size, fonts, etc. The guide is trimmed to 7.5" by 9", bound with a comb, and printed in black and white except for the color cover and back. We gave extra consideration to indexing. None of our writers claim special indexing skills, so we searched for clear, basic guidelines. Incidentally, STC Indexing SIG members are tabulating information about how corporate style guides handle indexing standards. More information is available from Beth Hamilton, (205) 621-1628, kbhamilton@sprynet.com. Encouraging usage To encourage usage, I try to bring our style guide to every writer's meeting. Our team regularly meets on Tuesday mornings to discuss project goals. We try to keep the meetings short because they usually involve an expensive conference call to India. Our style guide can help us save a few cents by more quickly resolving usage questions such as, "Is gearbox one word or two?" (It's one). The more often we use the guide as a group, the more likely we are to refer to it while working individually. When individual writers refer to our style guide, I think it is important for them to know they are part of a team, not cut off or creatively restricted. The style guide should promote inventiveness through teambuilding. Any team- writers or otherwise-will fall apart unless all members clearly understand their common purposes. You can use a style guide to reinforce shared project expectations with team members. Writers are more likely to use and help update a style guide if they feel empowered by it. When I say empowered, I mean it in the sense that writers should have both the responsibility and the authority to achieve the goal of adopting a style guide. According to Whitney Quesenbery, vice president of design services for Princeton Junction-based Cognetics Corporation (www.cognetics.com): "Writers should be encouraged to not only give quality feedback initially, but also submit their own hints, tips, and sample text to share with others long after the style guide has been published." So, writers should not only use a style guide, but also submit their own content. At that point, the style guide can inspire writers to take their craft more seriously, and then elevate the writing's professional quality. The style guide can also provoke healthy questioning, which leads to debate, and ultimately learning. Now we're back where we started-with an invitation to learn something new. I hope you did.

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Last updated: November 22, 1999 (dls)