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Re: Microsoft Manual of Style vs. github.com/MicrosoftDocs/microsoft-style-guide
Subject:Re: Microsoft Manual of Style vs. github.com/MicrosoftDocs/microsoft-style-guide From:Robert Lauriston <robert -at- lauriston -dot- com> To:TECHWR-L Writing <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Thu, 16 Aug 2018 15:51:07 -0700
The microsoft-style-guide GitHub project doesn't resemble open source.
It is open source. Microsoft has a huge presence on GitHub, I think
all their APIs and docs are there.
It's not your father's Microsoft. I was documenting a new Microsoft
Azure Marketplace offering from my company and needed to get
command-line access to the VM. The Azure Cloud Shell turned out to be
Bash.
On Thu, Aug 16, 2018 at 12:37 PM, Lauren <lauren -at- writeco -dot- net> wrote:
> The takeaway is that you can take it away but that doesnât mean that what
> the public provides will be in the copy incorporated in the never-final
> online guide. Microsoft looks like it is flailing with new ideas and it has
> built itself on flailing to success. You say Microsoft is doing the opposite
> of Apple. Using Git resembles the ever popular open source business model.
> We are watching a transformation and a possible new approach to technical
> writing style guides.
>
> This thread got too deep in to issues that do not interest me. Early on,
> there was a question of how to address related references and a suggestion
> of MMoS. MMoS no more; it has ceased to be. I know a dead style guide when
> I see one. MMoS is replaced by the Microsoft Writing Style Guide. I am
> saying that MMoS should not be used as a writing reference because it is
> obsolete and the online Microsoft guide is the current version of
> Microsoftâs writing âstyle.â
>
> As far as finding a resource to support an argument about whether to say
> âreferenceâ in the verb sense or to say âsee also,â I think the online
> Microsoft guide is good enough. As far as finding a reliable style guide, I
> would not use it and I never relied on MMoS, either. I think when it comes
> to writing style, Microsoft has always been at the low end of the range of
> reliable resources, if it ever was a reliable resource.
>
>
> On 8/16/2018 11:46 AM, Tony Chung wrote:
>
>> What they say and what Github enables are totally different things. If MS
>> is not open to external pull requests against their documentation, there's
>> nothing stopping us from forking the MSWSG to, say the TechWhirlers Style
>> Guide and rewriting everything to fit our image. But then that begs the
>> question, why start with something so MS-centric? Apple has its own Human
>> Interface Style Guide that describes things almost exactly the opposite of
>> MS. And as Robert mentioned, and that I am inclined to agree, why
>> Markdown?
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