Re: Style Guides

[Gregory Keith <GKeith -at- DELRINA -dot- COM>]

Bob Morrisette wrote:
>I have the task of updating/rewriting our style guide.
>Do any how-to-write style guide books exist?

Joan Chatman wrote a good guide to creating style guides,  as well as
writing a
style guide that got a best of show award at an STC conference. I've got a
copy from Joan, and am finding it useful to recommend improvements to our
style guide. (Thanks to Joan, and thanks to Stephen Schiller
(smschill -at- softart -dot- com) for the initial recommendation!)

Her new number is: 408-441-2256
Her e-mail address is:
joan -dot- chatman -at- aspect -dot- com

>Have any model style guides been published?

Well, there are good ones published by the big software players. The best
I've seen is Digital's, which is designed to be used with the Digital Guide
to Creating User Information. The two Digital docs are approx 300 pages
long, very thorough. Here's the details;

DOCUMENTATION STYLE GUIDES
Apple Publications Style Guide. (Cupertino, CA: Apple Computer, February
1994).
(Available from Apple Products Developer's Association at (US)
1-800-282-2732/ (Can) 1-800-637-0029 and on the Web at
www.info.apple.com/dev/developerservices.html, under the Publication Guides
directory. 380K compressed and binhexed.)

Digital Style Guide, by Susan I. Schultz, Jennifer J. Darrow, Frank X.
Kavanagh and Marjorie J. Morse. (Burlington, MA: Digital Press, 1993).

Microsoft Publications Style Guide. Version 1.0. (Redmond, WA: Microsoft
Corp, 1991).

Xerox Publishing Standards: A Manual of Style and Design. Xerox Corporation.
(Watson-Guptill Publications, 1988). ISBN 0-8230-5964-2.

>Do most writing groups use style guides as hard copy, on-line, or both?
We just have hard copy of ours, since we work with many outside
translators/DTP subcontractors and hard copy is easy to distribute. Also,
often when you have several apps running already and just need to quickly
check a style question, hard copy is easy to pull off the shelf. And last
but not least, we have a lot of network downtime, so hard copy avoids that
too.

Greg

Gregory Keith
Documentation Specialist
Delrina Canada
gkeith -at- delrina -dot- com

"Our minds are porous and forgetfulness seeps in: I myself am distorting and
losing, under the wearing away of the years, the face of Beatriz."
Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph