Re: Style guides?

[John Posada <jposada01 -at- yahoo -dot- com>]

> Being new to technical writing and wanting to 
> do things right from the start, what style guides do 
> you recommend? Recent discussions on the list have 
> tested me in what I thought were the right ways to write 
> terms. So what are the "must haves" in style guides?

I've been a writer for maybe 15 years and some people say I write
pretty good technical documentation. I can count on two hands the
number of times I've consulted a style guide. To be honest, I've
consulted this list way more than any printed manual.

Don't get me wrong...I own the MS and SUN style guides and have
Chicago in a box somewhere.

However, my real style guide is the people for whom I'm writing. My
advice is to learn the subject you are writing about and if what you
write is understood by the people for whom you are writing, nobody
will care what Strunk and White says about anything.

John Posada
Senior Technical Writer

"Bigamy is having one wife 
 too many. Monogamy is the same."
     --Oscar Wilde
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