Writing Better Reports: A Handbook for Civil and Environmental Engineers  

Based on faculty concerns, this handbook offers guidelines and exercises to help you improve your technical style.

Adams, David. Michigan State University (2003). Reference>Style Guides>Writing

Writing English for a Global Readership

As first-language English users we often need to communicate effectively with people for whom English is a foreign or a second language, for instance when conducting business internationally. The Internet, particularly, is a global medium of communication, and we cannot assume that everyone reads or understands English flawlessly.

Asterisks.com (1999). Reference>Style Guides>Writing

Writing Revisable Manuals: A Guidebook for Business and Government

Writing Revisable Manuals–A Guidebook for Business and Government was written to help organizations prepare high quality manuals, quickly and inexpensively. There is a saying in technical writing that 'You can have it good, you can have it fast, or you can have it cheap. But you can’t have all three.' The goal of this guidebook is to show you how to have all three. Focusing on revisable manuals—the kind you can update easily—this guidebook takes you step-by-step through planning, writing, and producing manuals. If you are working on a manual for your organization, or will be in the near future, this guidebook is for you.

Duncan Kent and Associates Ltd. (2000). Reference>Style Guides>Documentation

Writing Style Guide

The following is a description of Florida Institute of Technology's in-house writing style for everything except technical papers and reports. This guide is set up alphabetically and contains listings that will allow you to standardize everything you write for the university. Reference materials include The Associated Press Stylebook And Libel Manual (Fully Revised and Updated 1998 Edition), Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary and McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms (Fourth Edition).

Florida Institute of Technology. Reference>Style Guides>Writing

Writing Styleguide  

Many individuals and organizations develop style guides to provide standards for the development of publications. Style guides give rules and examples of writing style, word use, grammar, punctuation, capitalization, and typographic conventions. These standards are used when writing all kinds of documents—manuals, newsletters, reports, proposals, letters, memos, and so on—to maintain consistency and quality. Our style guide is organized alphabetically by keyword for quick reference.

Duncan Kent and Associates Ltd. (2002). Reference>Style Guides

Writing User-Friendly Documents  

The traditional way of writing government documents has not worked well. Too often, it has produced complicated, jargon-filled documents that have resulted in frustration, lawsuits, and a lack of trust between citizens and their government. To overcome this legacy, the documents writers have a great responsibility to communicate clearly. Studies show that clearly written regulations improve compliance and decrease litigation. Writing that considers our readers' needs and draws them into the regulatory process improves the relationship between the government and the public it serves. Clear correspondence reduces the burden on the public. It also reduces the burden on the agency because we don't have to deal with the consequences of unclear communication.

PLAIN (NPR) was.. U.S. Bureau of Land Management (2001). Reference>Style Guides>Writing

When Can I Use...

Compatibility tables for features in HTML5, CSS3, SVG and other upcoming web technologies in the most popular web browsers.

Deveria (2009). Reference>Web Design>Standards>HTML5

Technical Writing Guide  

This set of guidelines was developed to help you understand the expectations for technical communication in CE 314K (Properties and Behavior of Engineering Materials). Successful technical communication requires practice. Therefore, you should allot sufficient time to write several drafts of each assignment before submitting the final version.

Hart, Hillary. University of Texas (2007). Reference>Style Guides>Writing>Technical Writing

Regular Expression Tutorial - Learn How to Use Regular Expressions

Basically, a regular expression is a pattern describing a certain amount of text. Their name comes from the mathematical theory on which they are based. In this tutorial, I will teach you all you need to know to be able to craft powerful time-saving regular expressions. I will start with the most basic concepts, so that you can follow this tutorial even if you know nothing at all about regular expressions yet.

RegularExpressions.info. Reference>Editing>Search>Regular Expressions

Regular Expressions for Client-Side JavaScript

Here is the syntax for a very powerful and very cryptic string pattern matching scheme in the client-side JavaScript of web browsers. You can use it to validate form entry, parse URLs, and many other things.

Visibone (2007). Reference>Editing>Regular Expressions>JavaScript

Regular Expression

regular expressions provide a concise and flexible means for identifying strings of text of interest, such as particular characters, words, or patterns of characters. Regular expressions (abbreviated as regex or regexp, with plural forms regexes, regexps, or regexen) are written in a formal language that can be interpreted by a regular expression processor, a program that either serves as a parser generator or examines text and identifies parts that match the provided specification.

Wikipedia. Reference>Editing>Search>Regular Expressions

Quick Reference Guides: Short and Sweet Documentation

In this article, my colleague and I provide strategies, tips, and approaches we’ve learned in creating quick reference guides for software documentation projects.

Johnson, Tom H. I'd Rather Be Writing (2009). Articles>Documentation>Technical Writing>Quick Reference

Quick Reference Guides: Short and Sweet Technical Documentation  

Users often want documentation in a format that will give them the basics and get them on their way as fast as possible. Quick reference guides provide a short version of a manual, condensed from dozens or hundreds of pages down to just one double-sided sheet of paper. Despite the brevity of quick reference material, the thought process involved in creating, organizing, and laying out the content is time consuming. The format requires you to assess the content and decide the most important information the user needs to know. You must describe with extreme concision and clarity processes that usually require dozens of pages to explain. This article provides an overview of the strategies, tips, challenges, and benefits we have learned in using quick reference guides for our documentation projects.

Johnson, Tom H. and Benjamin Minson. Gryphon Mountain (2009). Articles>Documentation>Technical Writing>Quick Reference

Introduction to Basic Legal Citation

This introduction to legal citation is focused on the forms of citation used in professional practice rather than those used in journal publication. It aims to identify the more important points on which there is divergence between the rules set out in two common manuals and evolving usage reflected in legal memoranda and briefs prepared by practicing lawyers.

Martin, Peter W. Cornell University (2007). Reference>Style Guides>Legal

Browser Compatibility Table

A list of various CSS rules and their compatibility with common browsers and operating systems. With a quick glance, the designer or developer can note which CSS properties should be used or avoided. The table also offers an interactive feature that highlights the row your cursor is on. This makes pinpointing the compatibility of a specific CSS property much easier.

Centricle (2008). Reference>Web Design>CSS>Web Browsers

Quick Reference Guides Are More Useful Than a 150-Page User Doc 

I’m working on a project to boil a 150-page software user document down to a one-page reference guide that can be tacked to a CSR’s cube wall. Our goal with the one-page reference guide is to give the CSR a description of all the navigation elements and application functionality so they can quickly navigate to where they want to go without first having to trudge through the complete 150-page user doc.

Creel, Ron. Your Writing Dept (2009). Articles>Documentation>Technical Writing>Quick Reference