: Re: Is it overkill to follow style-guides for technical writing? I currently work for an engineering company as an electrical engineer. A good chunk of my time is spent writing testing reports or

@Speyer920

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For documentation that will be published outside your organization, it is usually important to follow a style guide (pretty much any one) so that all the documentation reads with one "voice" even though it was written by a bunch of different people. As noted by Lauren Ipsum, you don't read the style guide cover-to-cover but, rather, consult it on individual points. (You'll need to become familiar with what points it covers, though.)

I said it is "usually" important; you should ask the question first before proceeding to adopt a guide. There is an existing practice of "every man for himself"; are things that way because it really doesn't matter to the people in charge, or only because the question has never come up? If it's not important to them, then you'll need to make a case that it matters in proportion to the cost of adopting a new practice. The purchase price of the book is noise; the cost will be in changing everyone's work habits. If customers (or other important people) see this documentation then that may well be an easy pitch; if it's only used by the members of your team, it might not matter (much as it pains me, as a writer, to say that).

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