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 ************************************************** To view the austechwriter archives, go to www.freelists.org/archives/austechwriter To unsubscribe, send a message to austechwriter-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe" in the Subject field (without quotes). To manage your subscription (e.g., set and unset DIGEST and VACATION modes) go to www.freelists.org/list/austechwriter To contact the list administrator, send a message to austechwriter-admins@xxxxxxxxxxxxx **************************************************