Resources>Style Guides

The BBC News Style Guide

This style guide represents some of John Allen’s extraordinary wisdom surrounding the use of English in written and spoken communications. This is in many ways at the heart of what the BBC does and what it is respected for.This is not a “do and don’t” list but a guide that invites you to explore some of the complexities of modern English usage and to make your own decisions about what does and does not work. It should improve your scripts and general writing, not to mention making you feel better informed, challenged and amused.

A Guide to the Preparation of Theses and Dissertations in Science and Engineering

This guide is intended to help you write the best thesis you can by anticipating and answering common questions about content, structure, format, figures, and language. We have also included some suggestions on how to manage the process of turning your research -- your testing and reading, your findings and conclusions -- into a clear, complete, well-written, and convincing thesis or dissertation.

Apple Publications Style Guide

The Apple Publications Style Guide provides editorial guidelines for text in Apple instructional publications, technical documentation, reference information, training programs, and the software user interface.

European Union Interinstitutional Style Guide

One of the European Union’s vital tasks is to circulate and disseminate information in 11 languages. People are not generally aware of the scale and complexity of this task, and the ever-increasing amount and multilingual character of the documentation to be distributed, and it is only through continual development of the techniques used and constant rationalisation that the task can be accomplished each day. The Interinstitutional style guide has been produced with these things in mind.

Sample IEEE Documentation Style for References

References to sources should be numbered sequentially by order of mention in the text, with the number placed in brackets and printed on line (not as a super- or subscript) like [1].

Scientific Style Manual Aspires to International Scope

Despite what some U.S. editors may see as flaws or debatable recommendations, sooner or later anyone who edits scientific writing will consult Scientific Style and Format. Some may disagree with its style conventions, but they can be defended as serving the editors' stated goal of achieving a uniform international style for scientific publications.

A Handful of New Style and Usage Guides

Style and usage guides seem to have proliferated, and it's not always easy to discriminate between the valuable and the less so at a glance. Here are three that have come to hand recently and deserve mentioning for different reasons.

Writing Resources Online

This annotated directory features Web sites focusing on English grammar, concise writing, style and usage, the writing process, words, plain language, creativity, word play, action writing, reference sources, online writing experts, books on writing, and favorite fiction writers. You'll also find lists of Web sites on punctuation, avoiding bias, overcoming writer's block, spelling, vocabulary, and writing for the Web.

Guide to Effective Formatting

This guide supplements work instruction PR2-W3 - Document Formatting. It gives a detailed outline of the recommended document formatting standards for reports. You should use the standard Word template, which has been configured to conform with these guidelines.

Guide to Effective Report Writing

The Guide to Effective Report Writing outlines a practical method for IT professionals to develop and maintain reports which address the needs of the reader and which are expressed in language easily understood by the reader.

Standards and Style Guides

A bibliography of style guides useful for technical writers.

A Visual Guide to Document Design and Layout

Technical publications departments in their infancy seem to have great difficulty producing documentation that is well designed and consistent in appearance throughout all documents. As the department matures, it attempts to "consistify" the appearance of the documentation, but, unless there is an experienced template designer on board, this is often a drawn-out process involving focus groups and much squabbling. Once the design is complete, however, it tends to be nearly identical to the templates designed by every other technical publications department in the world. Aside from a handful of design features that distinguish the look and feel of one company's documentation from that of its competitors, everything else is pretty much the same. Whether the focus group spends six months or two years designing templates, they all discover that a well-designed user guide contains some specific and standard design elements.

Guide to Chicago Style Documentation

A guide to using the Chicago Style for writing.

The Linux Documentation Project

The Linux Documentation Project (LDP) is working on developing good, reliable documentation for the Linux operating system. The overall goal of the LDP is to collaborate in taking care of all of the issues of Linux documentation, ranging from online documentation (man pages, HTML, and so on) to printed manuals covering topics such as installing, using, and running Linux.

Big Guide to Guidelines

Our index of writer's guidelines lets you browse more than 1,500 guidelines, prepared by book and magazine editors themselves. Turn to Writer's Market for a complete rundown of a market's needs, then search here for more of the editor's viewpoint.

Establishing a Corporate Style Guide: A Bibliographic Essay

Deciding whether to establish a house style guide can be a difficult decision for corporate writing departments. Management must decide whether it is worth the time, money, and energy to develop its own specialized style guide when various general style books already exist on the market. And if a company does decide to go ahead and establish a house style guide, what form should the document take? Will the guide be effective? What considerations should be weighed in determining whether house style rules should be established in a particular business? This article surveys several recent studies that can help answer these questions by examining such mediating factors as explanations of why and how a style guide can improve document quality and consistency to the strategies for developing the guide itself.