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On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 12:10 PM, Mike Starr <mike -at- writestarr -dot- com> wrote:
> I have to disagree with devoting time to immediately creating a company-specific style guide.
...
> What she needs to do is hit the ground running and show them immediate real productivity.
I agree with Mike's assessment of the situation. I've recently become
the lone tech writer at our office, and while it's tempting to want to
mandate stylistic consistency from the get-go, all this effort is moot
unless we produce something.
That said, I really like the idea of using a wiki-based table to track
style usage decisions as they are made. That way everyone is on board
and has input from the beginning. The only overhead at the beginning
is to set up the content framework on the wiki, which is and should be
subject to change. At the beginning the table will collect more
questions than answers, but at least we can trace back our prior
decisions without having to reference scads of earlier documents.
(Fortunately in my case I'm building on a consistent base established
by my former colleague, so I'm not starting at ground zero. In this
environment it's in my best interest to play with macros and style
sheets to build enterprise-wide efficiencies.)
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