Style Guide Survey Results - Pt 1

[Nea Dodson <NeaDods -at- AOL -dot- COM>]

I meant to post this earlier, but Almost OnLine wasn't behaving.

Because about half the people who responded to the style guide survey wanted
to see the results, I decided to post them to the list.

Style Guides (listed in order of popularity):

Chicago - 18
Microsoft Manual of Style - 10
Strunk & White - 4
MLA, AP - 3
Turabian, GPO, APA, IEEE - 2
NY Public Library - 1
Chambers Technical, Xerox Style Guide, Digital Style Guide, Science &
Technical Writer's Manual of Style, and Wired Style Guide - 1

Note:  Every single respondant mentioned owning and using Chicago.  Also,
Turabian, IEEE, and the MS style guides are based on Chicago.

Dictionaries -

Only three non-specialized dictionaries were mentioned.  Webster's edged out
the other two by one vote, but those responses were split between editions.

Websters - 7 total
     Collegiate - 4
     Unabridged - 1
     New World - 1
     Hypertext - 1

American Heritage, OED - tied at 6

Comments:  "American Heritage doesn't bow to the whims of fashion."
 "American Heritage describes how words should be used, not how they are
used."

Essential Reference Books -
a full list will be in Results Pt 2, but only two books were mentioned twice:

Roget's Thesaurus
Managing Your Documentation Projects by J. Hackos

Non-Writing Jobs TWs are asked to do:

Only four jobs got more than one or two votes:

Desktop Publishing - 12
Training - 11
Designing/Creating Graphics & Diagrams - 8
Web Page Design - 7

Nea

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