: 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

@Cugini967

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I think you are confusing a style guide with a manual of style. The Chicago Manual of Style will help, but is more of a reference book of best practices, rather than a set of policies and procedures to guide document development processes for your particular business use.

It seems a style guide is what you are hoping to create and implement company-wide, something that standardizes things like sections in a report or user guide, typefaces used, logo and trademark usage, software to be used to create documentation, and template design standards. Do a web search for "technical style guide" and you will find examples.

Creating the style guide will not be your biggest task, however. Getting management to implement it as a requirement will be the greatest challenge, and if you don't have that, you will waste your work and annoy yourself and your coworkers. The key to getting management buy-in is to get them to understand that consistent documentation is part of consistent branding and messaging - your documentation is a part of the marketing effort.

Once you have management behind your effort, bring in your colleagues and work as a team to create a style guide tailored to your company culture and work flows. Include key members of engineering, customer service, and marketing teams in this effort as well, so that you get engineering on the same page with scheduling documentation lead times, learn about what in the documentation is confusing or frustrating customers from the people who have to deal with them regularly, and ensure that the terms you are using in the documentation are the same ones the marketing department uses, also that you are targeting the right audience by understanding the actual customer base and their real world use of the products.

Some style guides also cover document distribution processes and retention policies. These can be also be dealt with in separate procedures, as best fit your business use.

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