Structure: DigitalOcean’s guide is very specific about desired structure for their articles.It encourages you to write for all technical levels by avoiding assumptions of previous knowledge, giving context for code, and writing “friendly but formal” pieces that show respect for cultural differences. Style: This is further split into four sections that cover clarity, level of detail, completeness, and tone.
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While this guide focuses on clarity and quality, there’s also a companion technical best practices tutorial, which offers standards for how writers should discuss the tech they’re writing about (ie, how to write about installation, how to offer troubleshooting tips, and what to do with long scripts). DigitalOceanĭigitalOcean’s Technical Writing Guidelines is a three-section tutorial about how to write compelling technical articles for their Write for Donations program.
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Finally, it suggests following the Chicago Manual of Style and Fowler’s Modern English Usage as principal references for proper language usage. One of the more unique features of this style guide is its discussion of the use of metaphors. It offers advice about text formatting, assets like images and author bios, and some notes about how to refine the content itself. A List ApartĪ List Apart Style Guide is an example of a valuable, reader-centric, but more informal style guide.
Conventions: This section sets standards for formatting, such as using Markdown and how to add images to a post.Ĭommunication: In this section, v emphasizes the importance of keeping in communication with the editor or publisher you’re working with and letting them know of any roadblocks as you write.Īs you can see, it’s a technical blog post about how to write a technical blog post, a nice meta style guide.Content: The guide recommends a certain structure for blog posts and demonstrates how to support claims with evidence while avoiding plagiarism.Voice: It recommends using the second person ( you, yours) to engage the reader and establish a clear point of view.This guide breaks style into the following four sections: It’s used by several technical writers who cover a variety of topics, mainly because it sets down the basics of style decoupled from any context that’s too specific. Fortunately, many companies make their own technical writing style guides available publicly, so you can analyze their strengths as you create your own style.ĭv Technical Blogging Style Guide is a good place to start. Since style guides cover so much ground, they can be a chore to create from scratch. It usually covers the voice, structure, and technical conventions (such as the format of the text, audio, and images) used in the documentation. Itself a piece of documentation, a style guide defines communication standards for any tech document that your business produces, and all of your writers can follow it. How do you make your technical documentation more consistent? One of the first steps is to adhere to a technical writing style guide.
Also, consistency creates opportunities to build communities around technical documentation. In the field of technical writing, consistency is crucial because it provides the sense of confidence and continuity that every tech product needs to engage a user base. Great US soccer player Mia Hamm famously said, “It is more difficult to stay on top than to get there,” which suggests that consistency is a highly desirable trait. 10 Technical Writing Style Guides You Can Use
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