Re: Lone Tech Writer

[Julie Stickler <jstickler -at- gmail -dot- com>]

My Style Guide, like my Standard Terminology list and glossary, was
the result of lists that I started keeping mostly for myself.  It took
them several months to evolve from their (digital) chicken-scratch
beginnings into something vaguely resembling documents that I was
willing to share with the team.  I'd been here probably  5-6 months
before I felt like I had developed the sort of relationship with my
team where I could announce that we had a Style Guide.

I started with the Microsoft Manual of Style (because it is readily
available, can be found in stock on the shelves of my local Barnes and
Nobles, and comes with a CD containing a PDF version I could post on
our intranet) and then created a Wiki page where I have listed:
1 - Our Company trademarks
2 - Third party trademarks (Microsoft, Oracle, etc.) and links to
their legal pages listing trademarks
3 - Places where we differ from MMS (because I don't always agree with
Microsoft)
4 - Common style problems that I've observed in our doc or UI (even if
they appear in MMS)

Having it on our Wiki makes it easy for me to reference and make the
occasional update.  Because unless you're an editor, your Style Guide
will be lucky if it gets a couple minutes of attention here and there.


-- 
Julie Stickler
http://heratech.wordpress.com/
Blogging about Agile and technical writing
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