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What you describe sounds like what we called (at a previous job) a âWritersâ Handbookâ which accompanied a âStyle Guideâ. I would also understand âEditorial Guideâ to be the same as âStyle Guideâ or âEditorial Style Guide."
At that job, the Handbook was tool-specific and included topics like how to set up a new project with naming conventions, where to find templates, logos, and fonts; how to useÂÂelements like titles and headings, images, lists, links, conditional text, etc; production/publishing/delivery processes, and the like.
The Style Guide was more about writing style â how to capitalize headings and titles, spelling and capitalization of product/company terms, applicable GUI terminology use. It also covered style guidelines like âuse present tenseâ and âuse active voiceâ, with examples specific to our product suite. And it named published style guides (like the Chicago Manual of Style or the Microsoft Manual of Style) to use for questions we didnât cover explicitly.
I donât know how standard the âWritersâ Handbookâ name is â a quick google shows me that term can refer to a variety of collections. You could certainly combine all of these topics in a âStyle Guide.â âStyle Guideâ is a common English termÂÂâ a new writer might expect an established group to have some kind of "style guide."
Iâd suggest you share the content in a tool youâre already using that everyone has access to or that you want to be standard, so that itâs convenient for everyone. That could be something like Confluence or Google Docs â designed for collaboration. At that previous job, we used FrameMaker for our documentation, so the style guide and handbook were in FrameMaker in our standard template, so we could use those files to import templates/styles into our working docs.
Good luck!
Sharon
On Feb 16, 2021, 8:01 AM -0500, Riese, Claudia <CRiese -at- tunstall -dot- de>, wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I have the task of creating a so-called editorial guide. That is already my first question. I don't really know what the so-called editorial guide is actually called in English.
> First of all, I would like to explain my task in more detail: A company has locations in several countries. Products are developed at the different locations and documented by technical writers. Until now, the technical writers have worked independently of each other. This is to change. The processes at the different locations are to be standardised. The design of all manuals and online help should be the same. It is a long way until then.
> The processes are to be described in the so-called editorial guidelines. In addition, design specifications are to be made in the editorial guide. It is to become a tool that is continuously updated.
> In the past, editorial guides were manuals, i.e. PDF files. But I don't think that's up to date any more. I want to make the guide available online for the technical writers. Everyone should have the right to write. It could be a wiki, for example.
> I have the following questions:
> 1. what is the correct name for an editorial guide in English?
> 2. do you have any experience with editorial guides?
> 3. on what basis is an editorial guide that you know or would recommend? Wiki? Other idea?
> 4. can you show me an example?
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Claudia
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