The main thing about CMS is it is COMPREHENSIVE. So, to maintain a simple style guide, one purchases CMS and says in thy holiest of writs: Where there is no specific ruling, consult CMS. Then, just state your differences. A _whole_ world simpler and much more effective. Essential books, most stuff by JoAnne Hackos - especially the managing your doco projects one. Sun Tzu's Art of War - strategic planning. A book of five rings - Miyamoto Musashi - tactics If you are office bound and permanent, fork out the 100 bucks through Amazon for the world's biggest stand-alone book - M-W 3rd Int dictionary. It will give you a good idea of just how big you can go in print if you really need to. However, it is has two main uses. The first one is dead easy, when the programmers invent a whole new grammar in their interface labelling, or some impressive dude is just dunderheadedly sticking to their "its a word and I'm using it", you very casually sidle up to this ENORMOUS MONSTROSITY and casually start flicking therough the pages to the appropriate area and point it out. The sheer size of the book shuts EVERYONE up, if it aint in there, its not worth being official usage. There's plenty of legal words to draw from, run along now and behave :-) The second usage is even easier. When programmers (or SMEs) get recalcitrant you accidentally slam it on their fingers. Your changes are made so quick it is not funny, and the next time they see you with the dictionary in hand they start panicking. It is that look of fear in a coder's eyes that I live for, being a gun tech writer :-) My free Computer Art Primer from the www.raycomm.com site. Get it into you, great book, covers everything you will ever need to know about graphics. Its usually #1 in the search engines on that exact phrase :-) If you do S&M a thesaurus and a book of quotes are good. The Non-designer's design book is ok. By Robin Williams who also writes a stack of similar stuff. Eric Partridge, Usage and Abusage (Penguin). Do not try and read it, use it as a reference when you get stuck and you know it just doesnt look right. The weak verbs are dealt with comprehensively etc. Naturally I completely and utterly ignore this book when posting and instead try to employ the greatest possible variations in those 137 ish (I dunno, ask Jill) different conjugations, employable by an industrious typist as I do. Beginner Word users, www.wopr.com and check out Woody's books for the products you love to hate. Beginner's VBA - dunno, lots of choices, dont really like any of em :-) Use Amazon search and read the comments. MS Office Apps VBA help is good too. Intermediate Word or VBA users - my spellbooks from the url below Advanced VBA - VBA Developer's Handbook by Ken Getz and friend. Steve Hudson Word Heretic, Sydney, Australia Tricky stuff with Word or words for you. Email: steve@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Products: http://www.geocities.com/word_heretic/products.html Spellbooks: 728 pages of dump left and dropping... -----Original Message----- From: Charles Cave Sent: Monday, 4 August 2003 4:17 PM Hello, I was wondering if you could comment on the usefulness of the Chicago Manual for Style for Australian conditions. I have done some tech writing for software companies in my role of Support Engineer, and looking to do further work as a technical writer. A related question would be "What books do you consider ESSENTIAL in the tech writer's personal library?". ************************************************** To post a message to austechwriter, send the message to austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx To subscribe to austechwriter, send a message to austechwriter-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "subscribe" in the Subject field. To unsubscribe, send a message to austechwriter-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe" in the Subject field. To search the austechwriter archives, go to www.freelist.org/archives/austechwriter To contact the list administrator, send a message to austechwriter-admins@xxxxxxxxxxxxx **************************************************