1,160,000,000 hits for “why style guides?”

I casually gave a search in the smartest search engine ‘Google’ to take a dig about the need of style guides. It produced 1,160,000,000 results. The total number of search generated, definitely guarantees the importance of style guides but at the same time these numbers do not justified the relevance of the content what I was looking for. Nevertheless, even if I narrow down my search, I am sure I am going to get quite large number of sites which will have message for me about the style guides.

Why style guides? Do we really need it? The answer from most of the technical writers is going to be ‘yes’ in all cases. This is the approach of any technical writer to produce documentation conforming to the elements of writing to be consistent across all the documents of same nature. For publications or companies with a large number of contributing writers, a style guide is essential if the end product has to look alike.

Style guide becomes important for technical writing, commercial or business writing, journalism, web copy writing and many other forms of publications. In all these cases, to ensure the consistent writing style, guidelines are usually published. This allow writers to contribute avoiding their personal element of style but to adhere to the style of publication, company or website.

A style guide provides a means of documenting basic rules or features of the writing. For technical writers a style guide for a particular customer or project is to ensure that the data they deliver is in acceptable form and in consistent to the previous deliveries or other publications that the customer already has.

The style guides differs depending upon company, publication, customer because of the fact that there is no single authoritative source on styles for written English. The use of punctuation and correct grammar is well established and clear but style is much more than just the correct usage of punctuation, grammar and vocabulary.

Style can define many different aspects such as document structure, paragraph numbering and indentation, the use of headings, the use of lists, trademark or branding considerations, sentence lengths, layout, font sizes, depth of treatment of a subject, spelling (UK v US for example), readership considerations, use of abbreviations, terminology, the use of symbols, and voice preferences (active v passive).The list could go longer too. The fact is creative writers may not be worried about these listed items, whereas a technical writer will have to heed to all of these defined styles.

For a writer who is associated with a company or publication will follow the guided principles laid down by the employer but the real challenge is for Freelance writers. Freelance writers should continually evolve style guides for each customer or publication type.

Most of the creative writers love using their own styles. Nothing is wrong about that but if they only follow certain amount of styling consistently the job of proofreading and reviewing becomes easier. That is why sometimes the publisher prescribes certain guidelines to send your write-ups in the particular format and use defined styles. Failing which even if your write-up is brilliant, it will not see the light of the day.

Some of the writers would still disagree to follow the style guides. For them, ‘long live imagination, bury the style guides’ may be the catch line. You too can fall into this category if you are not tied up as a contract technical writer being on the payroll of a company. Technical writing is structured writing and it demands certain style guides to be followed.

Taming MS Word

You might be a MS Word user for quite some time, may be for a year, two years, five years or even more. In fact majority of the people who are into writing or even in non-writing profession opt MS Word as a word processing tool. Are there any good reasons for choosing this tool? I bet there could be many. First and foremost, MS Word being the first and only word processing tool to be in the market which had all the utility based features with appropriate GUI that is easy to work with. Another could be that this works well on Windows platform. Of course, other word processor too works well. However, there is no doubt that MS Word became an obvious choice for the people who opted for Windows OS.

MS Word evolved with the passage of time adding more features into subsequent releases. For the users, availability of the new features always added more spices to their delight. But more added features brought more complexity to the application and user complain began pouring in. The older versions of the word regarded to be more stable than the newer versions. Although, MS Word crashing is not an often reported phenomenon, still it poses different kinds of problem which can make you go mad. At times you will bewilder to think why your most lovable word processor behaves so stupid. Some times the problems are so horrible that you will really think twice whether to use word in professional environment or not.

One such problem or call it the biggest problem I have faced with word is increasing the file size from some 350 Kb to 13.5 Mb size in few minutes time. Any action you perform on this file takes you long time and increases the files size exorbitantly and finally at one point it hangs. Try opening it again, doesn’t work at all. This happens especially when you are working with the customize word templates and supposed to create fairly long documents using formatting and graphics. In my personal experience this bloating problem is inherent with Word 2003 and later editions.

So, one of the way to work with long documents is to get back to the earlier versions of the word which might not give you this problem. But you can never be sure, because the code structure for the different version of the application will not be much different. However, this can relieve you a bit.

The major issue is to trouble shoot this if you are in the middle of the work and quite good amount of time is spent on the document. With trial and error experiments, we came across some solution which could be useful. If you are faced with such situation, try doing the following:

1. Open the Word document in MS Word, if possible. If this is not responding, try opening it with Internet Explorer. I think it should open.

2. Save as HTML or RTF. Name the file with an HTML extension or RTF extension, e.g. communication.html.

3. Open communication.html file.

4. Save communication.html with a new Word .doc extension, e.g.communication1.doc.
This process of converting the Microsoft Word file into HTML and back into Word, removes all the unnecessary codes in the file, and will reduce the file size significantly.

Well, the file which was earlier of 10 Mb size reduces to less than 1 Mb size rather quite closer to the original size. On further query and discussion with pals and colleagues, surfaced the same difficulties but all had opinion to avoid this situation rather than trouble shoot.

Points of advice suggested were to follow certain golden principles while working with word template. Few of them are:

Do not cut and paste materials directly from one file into another as this will bring unwanted styles in the target Word file. Instead convert it to raw text and then import.

Avoid using the default settings in the Normal.dot template file.

Do not cut and paste graphics into Word. Instead, reference them with Insert | Picture.

Insert graphics at the end, when all content is ready.

Do not use default Word auto-format settings in the Table.

Use only styles to create bullets. Avoid using the toolbar and menu options to create bullets. Avoid over-rides. Supposedly bullet lists cause more damage than any other feature in Word.

The list might go on and on depending upon the user experiences. Probably the future releases of MS Word might address these problems, but we may experience certain other problems. This makes us weigh other available options. However, on the usability index, MS Word would exceed any other word processing tool in the market. Even otherwise, those available tools could be complete error free is not guaranteed. The question is, shall we say bye to word and adopt the new tool. Certainly we will differ in our approaches depending upon our need. Nevertheless, most of us would prefer to tame MS Word to cater our need than to switch over to some other tools. I am sure these pointers in mind will help reduce the file size and avoid corrupting the document template.