A style guide or style manual is a set of standards for design and writing of documents, either for general use or for a specific publication or organization. Style guides are commonly used by technical communicators in large organizations.
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Five FAQs About Business Writing
A few style guide tips for novice business writers.
ULiveandLearn.com (2005). Articles>Writing>Style Guides>Business Communication
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Frequently Asked Questions About English
Asterisks.com answers some frequently asked questions about English usage.
Asterisks.com (1999). Articles>Writing>Style Guides
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This manual mostly follows Associated Press style but also follows advice of other excellent books on writing and Web sites listed in Garbl's Writing Resources Online -- and my selection and interpretation of their guidelines. This guide focuses on U.S. standards for spelling, punctuation, definitions, usage, style and grammar.
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One of the most significant changes taking place in English is the rejection of the way that 'man' was assumed to include 'woman'. Most of us want our writing to be friendly and inclusive. How can we avoid using 'man', 'he', and 'his'?
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Gender-Neutral Technical Writing
Gender-neutral writing uses language that does not stereotype either sex nor appear to be referring to only one sex when that is not the writer's intention. In this article, you'll see why gender-neutral writing is important for technical writers to use, what gender-neutral writing is not, and how you can use gender-neutral writing in the documents you develop.
Weber, Jean Hollis. TECHWR-L (2002). Articles>Writing>Style Guides>Gender
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Getting Your Style Guide Written! 
This paper describes how to approach the project of writing a stand-alone Style Guide that provides technical writers and other employees with a reference for documentation procedures and policies. A Style Guide project is often placed aside while other priority projects forge ahead. This occurs for several reasons, the most common being that writing a Style Guide is a monumental task! This paper provides you with the skeleton to manage a Style Guide writing project and deliver the product on time
Taylor-Collins, Pamela. STC Proceedings (1995). Articles>Style Guides>Editing
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A Global Style Guide: Working Together Around the World
As a result of acquisitions and mergers, companies can find themselves working together worldwide and sharing documentation to distribute in different markets. The original source documentation will probably need to be adapted by some of the companies in the distribution channel to accommodate different languages, branding and content in order to meet the requirements of these different markets. This sharing and reuse of documentation between companies worldwide is easier when all the companies in the distribution channel share a common style guide.
O'Neill, Jennifer. STC Proceedings (2002). Articles>Style Guides>International
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GNOME 2.0 Human User Interface Guidelines
This document tells you how to create applications that look right, behave properly, and fit into the GNOME user interface as a whole. It is written for interface designers, graphic artists and software developers who will be creating software for the GNOME environment. Both specific advice on making effective use of interface elements, and the philosophy and general design principles behind the GNOME interface are covered.
Gnome.org (2003). Design>User Interface>Style Guides>Linux
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GNOME Documentation Style Guide
The GNOME Documentation Style Guide provides guidelines for authors who want to contribute to the GNOME Documentation Project.
GNOME (2004). Reference>Style Guides>Documentation>Linux
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Going to Bat Against the Dictionary
The T-shirt, commonly misspelled 'tee shirt,' is so named because it resembles the letter T when spread out. Tee ball, commonly misspelled 'T-ball,' is so named because a ball is hit off a tee. Is that so difficult? Apparently it is. Unanimously, as far as I can tell, dictionaries favor the non-informative T-ball. Some of those dictionaries don't even recognize tee ball as an alternate spelling. Some very smart people think I'm out of my mind for having such strong feelings in favor of the tee- version.
Slot, The (2001). Reference>Style Guides
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The Good Grammar, Good Style™ Pages
Do you have a question about style, grammar, or mechanics? Find the answer to your questions in the Good Grammar, Good Style Archive — over 100 pages of useful articles and frequently asked questions!
Factotum Ink, Limited (2002). Reference>Style Guides>Grammar
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A website about English grammar for students.
Verkouteren, J. Adrian. St. Albans School (1998). Reference>Style Guides>Grammar
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Back in 1990, Leonard and Gilsdorf presented 45 instances of questionable usage, in full-paragraph contexts, to both academics and working business executives. These usage elements included sentence fragments, assorted punctuation problems, pronoun–antecedent (dis)agreement, and various examples of questionable word choice. Their intent was to assess the “botheration level” of each usage “error”; their conclusions were that 1) academics are (nearly) always bothered by usage “errors” more than executives and 2) usage elements that bothered survey respondents the least were evolving over time into acceptable English usage. Just over ten years later, these same researchers have followed up on their original study and have drawn similar conclusions from the more recent data.
Manning, Alan D. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication (2002). Articles>Language>Style Guides
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Grammar, Punctuation, Spelling
The Web abounds with sites teaching grammar, punctuation, and spelling. Not surprisingly, most of these sites are provided by educational institutions, teachers, or business-writing consultants, presumably to make up for the lack of grammar teaching in so many school systems for the past several decades. Some are tutorials (masquerading as style guides) for technical communicators. Here are a few sites that I have found useful or that other people have recommended to me.
Weber, Jean Hollis. Technical Editors Eyrie (2002). Articles>Style Guides>Writing
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Grammar, Spelling, and Punctuation
A guide on punctuation, capitals, spelling, sentence construction and parts of speech.
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This site is dedicated to answering grammar, composition, or formatting questions.
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Guidance on Style Guides: Lessons Learned
This article highlights some of the lessons that I’ve learned about the process of creating style guides and implementing processes for ensuring that a product is consistent in a number of dimensions. I discuss the purposes and benefits of a style guide, a process for creating a style guide, the many types of consistency, reasons why style guides fail, methods for ensuring consistency, and some references that discuss these issues in more detail.
Wilson, Chauncey E. Usability Interface. Articles>Style Guides
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A Guide for Writing Research Papers Based on Modern Language Association (MLA) Documentation
The formatting of citations recommended in this guide is based on Modern Language Association recommendations. This guide may suffice for most students' needs for most academic purposes, but for advanced research projects it is by no means a substitute for the Modern Language Association Handbook for Writers of Research Papers Fifth Edition (1999). That handbook can be purchased in most bookstores and copies should be available in every college and municipal library. A Guide similar to this one, but based on the APA style, is also available online (see link on the navigation bar). Your best source of advice on all these matters is, of course, your instructor and library professionals.
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Guide to Chicago Style Documentation
A guide to using the Chicago Style for writing.
Temple University (2002). Resources>Documentation>Style Guides
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Guide to Citation Style Guides
An annotated collection of links to the best and most up-to-date citation guides that show how to properly cite resources from the Internet. Style guides for APA, MLA, Chicago, Turabian, BSE, styles and a description of how to cite references from Lexis/Nexis.
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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.
Tuffley, David. Griffith University (2000). Resources>Style Guides>Statistics>Reports
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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.
Tuffley, David. Griffith University (2000). Resources>Style Guides>Reports
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These notes are a miscellany of grammatical rules and explanations, comments on style, and suggestions on usage I put together for my classes. Nothing here is carved in stone, and many comments are matters of personal preference — feel free to psychoanalyze me by examining my particular hangups and bêtes noires. Anyone who can resist turning my own preferences into dogma is welcome to use this HTML edition.
Lynch, Jack. Rutgers University (2001). Reference>Style Guides
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A web-based complete guide to English syntax and grammar.
Darling, Charles. Capital Community College (2001). Reference>Style Guides>Grammar
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Nobody would deny that usability guidelines, applied in context by a usability professional, are extremely valuable in guiding a website evaluation. The problem occurs when non-professionals apply these guidelines out of context. This can result in an unimaginative site that looks bland and homogenous. To design usable sites that truly engage customers we need to replace simple guidelines with a customer-centred design process.
System Concepts (2005). Design>Web Design>Style Guides>Collaboration
