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.
