atw: Re: Style guide: keep it short
- From: "Stuart Burnfield" <slb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2008 08:20:00 +0800
Hi Janice. As far as large companies are concerned, I agree with you.
As a contract writer at IBM, I found the style guide, word usage
database and other resources a great help and a pleasure to use. I'm
sure it would be the same working for Sun.
I'm assuming that few of us on this list need to develop a style
guide for a large company. We're talking about companies large enough
to need one, but small enough not to have one already--possibly
dozens/hundreds of contributors, but only a handful of writers and
editors.
If writers want to find out how to increase their skill level for
indexing, I would point them first to the three brusque bullet points
in my style guide, then to the indexing chapter in RMF!, then to
Nancy Mulvaney's book. But in my experience this hasn't happened
often.
In a smallish organisation, it's so hard to get anyone to follow the
most basic elements of a template or style guide. Given that, I
believe that 50 guidelines (of which ten or so are actually followed)
are better than 500 guidelines (of which ten or so are actually
followed).
Stuart
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