Newsletter of the East Bay Chapter of STC
January/February 2004

Style Never Goes Out of Style

by Bill Dubie and Dave Sciuto, Northern New England Chapter

This article is reprinted from the July/August 2003 issue of The Nor’easter, Northern New England Chapter.

We've often been accused of lacking style, and we readily admit to a fashion faux pas or three, but when it comes to creating documentation, we like to have every fashion accessory available. You have your basic Strunk and White, your Words into Type, and your AP Stylebook and Libel Manual (Dave has dog-eared the Libel part). For technical writers, editors, engineers, and developers, there's the Microsoft Manual of Style, now available in Help format.

Having a style manual available on the desktop becomes more than a convenience for us: A quick look in the Appendix can give us a list of acronyms and abbreviations. Does "KB" stand for "kilobyte" or "kilobit"? Is "debug" a viable substitute for "troubleshooting"? In a white paper, should we leave our modifiers dangling en flagrante?

We dispute some tenets ("The meeting is at 12:00 noon" and "The date changes at exactly 12:00 midnight" are, as every editor knows, redundant), but we like having a reference available with a click. Of course, you might not wish Mr. Gates and company to dictate how your document should sound; however, there's very little "Microsoftese" in the style guide. Most of it is basic style sense.

The file is a downloadable executable that you can open and save on your hard disk, then place a shortcut to it on your desktop. The style guide is simply a Help file with a .CHM extension, and you navigate it as you would any Help file.

Now, when we send our technical documents into the world, we fully accessorize and wear our words with panache.

Listen to The Computer Report with Bill Dubie and Dave Sciuto Sundays at noon on WOTW in Nashua, New Hampshire and WGAW in Gardner, Massachusetts. Contact Bill and Dave.

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