Do you waste hours of your day searching for the best way to use headers in a document? Do you lose sleep at night, tossing and turning over whether to use the serial comma? Do you spin around in your desk chair, dizzying yourself over the best way to organize the sections of a report?
The Style Guide is here to help. These pages will be filled with advice to help you muddle through all the decisions that have to be made when piecing together effective documents, be they technical, business, or educational in nature.
There is rarely a day that goes by in my professional editing and writing career that doesn’t require research on some topic related to how technical or business documents should be styled. How should the names of user interface (UI) components be formatted, for example? How should the ever-growing number of “e” words (e-commerce, evite, e anything) be spelled? Hyphenated? Not hyphenated? How about at the beginning of sentence? Why does it matter?
If you don’t have an expert at your disposal, you’ll find yourself falling down the wormhole of online searches or combing through pages of references. Next thing you know, the day is over and you’ve gotten nowhere.
Enter the Style Guide. Here, I will have at least one post every two weeks on topics ranging from the treatment of special words to the best practices for the use of fonts, and anything and everything in between. The Style Guide is here to provide a concise online resource focused exclusively on issues related to technical, business, and internet style. The Style Guide is not, however, a forum for discussions on grammar. There are already a plethora of those out there.
So, let me be the one to lose sleep at night. Come back in a couple weeks for my thoughts on why the heck you need a style guide.