The great thing about style guides is that you have so many to choose from.
—Andrew Tanenbaum (paraphrased from his comments on standards).
Until I became a publisher, I was skeptical about style guides. When I managed writers, my view was that readers were primarily concerned with accurate and complete information, and style should take a back seat. Yes, a style guide would help make our content more consistent and improve quality, but in an organization trying to do too much with too little, we weren't looking for style points, just the best docs we could churn out on schedule. Possibly cynical but, in my view at that time, realistic. Plus, given that you can start a flame war on any writing forum with a comment about commas inside quotations, chapters starting on a recto page, punctuation in lists, or serial commas, trying to get writers to agree on a style guide seems like a waste of time.
Having just spent the last several weeks working on four simultaneous projects, two of which include editing, I've changed my mind (in part). I still think style takes a back seat to accuracy and completeness, not to mention structure, findability, and accessibility. However, I've decided that the biggest win is productivity.
Productivity and Style
The reason is simple. No writer—other than a true deadbeat or know-it-all—is immune to concerns about style. Put a good writer in an environment without any style guidance, and he or she will look for it. I'm convinced this tendency is in every good writer's DNA. The only way to counteract nature is to provide a style guide. That way the search is localized and finite. Otherwise, it's open ended. A search for “serial comma” on Google yields nearly 89,000 results, and even on the first page of results, you will encounter enough debate to keep a conscientious writer occupied for hours; I just spent 15 minutes looking at entries as I wrote this article, and I've already made my decision about the serial comma (yes, always).
The more you can put on autopilot, the faster you will work. The style guide says “only capitalize proper nouns in index entries,” done. The style guide says “use title case for chapter titles and sentence case for headings,” done. The style guide says “Use Internet, not internet,” done, and, even better, you can program your spell-checker to do the work. In fact, with structured content, you can automate a lot of style questions and forget about them entirely.
In a recent blog entry (Blemished—but better—tech comm?), Alan Pringle makes the point that it's more important to make your content “accurate, accessible, and intelligent,” even if that means there will be a few “stylistic blemishes.” I agree 100%. As long as using a style guide gives you more time through eliminating fruitless decisions, use it. The minute it turns you into an automaton, stop.
Standard is better than better
It doesn't really matter what style guide you follow. No matter which one you use, you are guaranteed to find writers who will disagree with something. One of the few guarantees in life (right after death and taxes) is that no two writers will agree on every point in any style guide. That's human nature, and the only way to combat it is by mandate or coin flip. I doubt any style guide of value was ever completed by consensus, so don't try. Just choose something plausible and move ahead.
So what does a style guide do for me as a publisher? It gives me a framework to hand authors and editors. It saves them time asking, and me time answering, straightforward questions. Before XML Press developed a style guide, authors and editor were always checking on points of style and asking for guidance. Now that we have one (we use Chicago Manual of Style with a few local additions on a single wiki page), the number of questions has gone down. I don't know if it has really improved the quality of the writing, but it greases the path for writers and editors, and makes my life as a publisher much easier.
Richard L. Hamilton is the founder of XML Press, which is dedicated to producing high quality, practical publications for technical communicators, managers, content strategists, and marketers and the engineers who support their work. Richard is the author of Managing Writers: A Real-World Guide to Managing Technical Documentation, and editor of the 2nd edition of Norm Walsh's DocBook: The Definitive Guide, published in collaboration with O'Reilly Media.