Re: Purpose Statement for Style Guide

[Janice Gelb <janiceg -at- marvin -dot- eng -dot- sun -dot- com>]

Rebecca <rebeccam -at- envworld -dot- com> wrote:
| Our new management thinks that our Style Guide is a
| luxury and a waste of
| time.  Can you provide me with some well-thought-out
| arguments as to why a
| tech. pubs. team would "need" to have one?
|

I've done a few presentations on this, which you 
may want to look at (URLs below).

Main points include:

* Ease of localization

* Lack of confusion for customers, and therefore 
  customer confidence in documents

* Writers not having to re-invent the wheel when 
  faced with similar situations

* Shared vocabulary for indexing

* Enables external groups such as contractors or 
  marketing to contribute documentation that 
  blends with your style

You may want to look at the complete style guide 
presentation I did a couple of years ago that's 
up (in graphics format, sorry) on my home page 
at http://www.geocities.com/j_gelb/gfx001.html

I also did a presentation on establishing an editorial 
forum for company style guidelines that covers why 
style guidelines are necessary. That one is on the 
STC presentations web site at
http://www.stc.org/47th/confinfo/postconf/Editorial%20Forum.pdf


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