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If this is your first attempt at a style guide, start small and add
quarterly or yearly or whatever period you find making global updates
appropriate.
On the subject of scope:
I have seen style guides that are about 10 pages long and then some that
seem about 1500 pages (Unisys--I actually never counted).
The philosophy espoused by short guides is to manage exceptions as they come
up and let writers do what they want. As Dick pointed out, the template
user manual is a separate guide.
The longer guides explain the construction of the templates as well
(specific margins, font use, paragraph types, heading logic, etc.) From a
longer guide, you should be able to create a template from a longer guide.
What is typically left out of style guides (that I have read) is style.
What you typically find is punctuation exceptions and formatting rules.
When you have a number of writers and a lot of documentation, you really
want all the writing to have the same voice and blend together.
Visually this is handled by formatting and punctuation rules (visual style?)
IMHO, How a writer approaches a topic and writes about it is (verbal?) style
and that is what I would love to see in more style manuals.
BTW, the Vidiom style manual is a longer style manual (weighing in at about
300 pages--the fifth SG I have written). It covers voice, documentation
philosophy, use of templates, documentation procedures, and of course
formatting and punctuation rules. It also has some oddball reference
appendixes on BNF, formatting code, acronyms, and includes a company
glossary that is constantly being updated. It is FrameMaker specific, but
includes all the information to make a transition between FrameMaker and
anything else (all metrics for templates are included). Also a process for
updating the style manual is included.
Finally, Vidiom is creating a different style manual for online documents.
We do not have a corporate style manual yet, but we are talking about it.
The corporate style manual will include the appropriate uses of the logo,
confidentiality issues, branding issues, etc., as well as the style in which
Vidiom's paper correspondences should read, etc....
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