Using Style Guides to Achieve Content Collaboration and Consistency

Attend Live

Please be aware! The video for this session will not be available until after Lavacon. Be there or miss out. This is only one of the reasons why you should always attend a TC Dojo live.

Style Guides: What Goes In Them and What Can They Cover?

Style guides serve an important role, establishing guidelines to improve communication, ensure consistency, and enforce best practices in composition, presentation, and language, and representing the specific needs of the business and it’s customers.

Most organizations adopt one of the major manuals of style (like the Chicago Manual of Style or the Microsoft Manual of Style) and develop an internal “house style” that further defines the voice, tone, and vocabulary.

We find style guides everywhere–in stand-alone documents, application templates, in stylesheets–and we find more when we move out of desktop publishing into automated publishing systems.

In this session, you’ll learn how style guides can help with collaboration and improve consistency. I’ll describe the different kinds of style guides, what each contains, and when you need them. We’ll talk about the different kinds of style guides and what each one covers. We’ll normalize some vocabulary so you will always know what someone else means.

Attend the Webinar

A shortened version of the full presentation, learn the basics in 30-minutes. 

About Liz Fraley

Liz Fraley, CEO of Single-Sourcing Solutions, is well known for her advocacy of defining requirements. She has founded two companies, sits on the boards of three non-profits, and is constantly coming up with new ways to share knowledge in the technical communications and content industries. She has worked in high-tech and government sectors, at companies of all different sizes (from startups to huge enterprises). She advocates approaches that directly improve organizational efficiency, productivity, and interoperability. If you ask her, she’ll say she’s happiest when those around her are successful. Her first book, “Arbortext 101: Best Practices for Configuring, Authoring, Styling, and Publishing with Arbortext,” is available on Amazon. She has several more planned.

View the Slides

References

• Building a Style Guide from the Ground Up (Cathy Jones, Jack Henry & Assoc.)
• Style Guides: Fashionable But Also Practical (Keith Schengili-Roberts, Ixiasoft)
• Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab (includes: APA, AMA, MLA, CMOS)
  https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/purdue_owl.html
• Microsoft Style Guide
  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/style-guide/welcome/
• IBM Editorial Style Guide
  Online: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/styleguidelines/index.html
  Amazon: https://amzn.to/2LiqjTa
• DITA Best Practices: A Roadmap for Writing, Editing, and Architecting in DITA (Laura Bellamy, et. al.)
  http://bellamy.tcdojo.org
• Practical DITA (Julio Vazquez)
  http://julio.tcdojo.org
• Etteplan’s “The Booklet” (Simplified Technical English)
  https://www.simplifiedenglish.net/library/
• Amazon Product Page Style Guides
  https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/external/G200270100
• The DITA Style Guide (Tony Self)
  https://amzn.to/2DJaiiA

Presented at

• Lavacon 2019 (Portland OR)
• TC Dojo 2019
• STC Summit 2019 (Denver CO)
• CMS DITA NA 2018 (Denver CO) (as a Birds-of-a-Feather lunch discussion topic)
• CMS DITA NA 2019 (Durham NC) (as a Birds-of-a-Feather lunch discussion topic)

At STC Summit 2019, she had standing room only and people in the hall!

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