: 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

@Hamaas631

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If the documentation is only ever going to be written by one person, and read by the same group of people, that documentation does not require a style (assuming it is internal documentation, not going to customers). As long as both sides understand it, it can work, although it may take newcomers to the reading a while to understand. If writing it in biblical Greek works for this situation, there are no problems with doing that.

However, almost all documentation, even internal, will be written by more than one person, and read by different people over time. It may be instructions for testing, but QA auditors may also need to see it. Instruction documents may be initially intended for a set groups, but they might then be stored for new people. Therefore, some form of standards are a good idea, although they may not need to be as rigorous as for external users.

The purpose is not to ensure that everything is always consistent and professional, it is to ensure that new people can understand and interpret documentation the correct way. So minor typos are not so important, but clarity and consistency are.

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