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Corporate style guide [was: Re: Punctuating the end of bullet points?]
Subject:Corporate style guide [was: Re: Punctuating the end of bullet points?] From:Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca> To:TECHWR-L <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>, Peter Neilson <neilson -at- alltel -dot- net> Date:Thu, 04 May 2006 10:12:46 -0400
Janice Gelb responded to my comments about not always cleaving to the
corporate style guide: <<However, individual writers should *not* just
discard corporate style guide solutions as they're writing if they
happen to personally disagree with a particular decision. That defeats
the purpose of a corporate style guide.>>
Many would argue that "corporate style" is an oxymoron. That aside, I
was thinking more from the editor's viewpoint than the writer's
viewpoint. It's certainly true that if every writer simply disregards
style recommendations they disagree with, this wastes everyone's time
because the editor charged with enforcing the style guide will simply
have to undo all that work, cursing the author all the while. That's
not a good thing for anyone.
Nonetheless, I stick by my guns: no style guide is ever completely
comprehensive, and just about any guide (if slavishly followed) can
lead to nonsensical choices that provide no service to the reader. The
people responsible for compliance with the style guide should have
authority to overrule the guide when that's appropriate. This should
never be a matter of preference or simple rebellion against authority;
it should be a carefully considered decision intended to benefit the
user.
Janice also noted: <<However, corporate style guides are intended to
ensure consistency among a varied group of writers so that all
publications issued by the company have a common style. If a writer in
that situation has a serious problem with a recommendation, presumably
some editorial body exists to review decisions.>>
Fully agreed with the general principle, and indeed, style guides
should evolve over time to cover exceptions to the original guidelines
and new situations not covered by those original guidelines. The
important point is that the guide breaks down when you try to apply it
to situations for which it wasn't intended.
The more interesting and diverse the work you do, the more of these
situations you encounter. Janice, writing from the corporate
(specifically, Sun) perspective, deals with more predictable material
than I do; my material covers a wide range of material in the sciences,
with a correspondingly wide range of exceptions. The more predictable
and constrained the work, the more likely it is that you shouldn't
violate the style guide; the less predictable and constrained, the more
often you'll have to make a decision about whether advice is relevant.
The ideal situation is that the editor, who is in charge of enforcing
the style guide, should have the authority to sit down with the writer
and discuss whether an exception is justified. Occasionally, it will
be. That's where I return to my original statement that there's a
difference between consistency and foolish consistency: the former
supports the reader; the latter supports only the style guide,
irrespective of whether doing so supports the reader.
Peter Neilson responded: <<There are times when a corporate style guide
is exceedingly unhelpful. We watched as our carefully devised plan for
having a different cover for each manual (so that the user could pick
out the one he needed at a glance) was drowned by the Corporate Style
Guide. Suddenly the new books were all identical, and you had to read
each book's spine or perhaps its interior to figure out which one you
held in your hand.>>
This is why I'm more heretical than most editors when it comes to style
guides: it doesn't take long before people begin treating them as
bodies of inviolable law, and they become so atherosclerotic that they
lead to stupid decisions. The compromise in this situation is to do
what we did when I worked for the feds: establish a flexible "visual
identity program". The result is a set of guidelines that ensure that
every document in a series is instantly recognizable as belonging to
that series, but that also allows each document to be visually
distinct.
One simple example was for a series of technical reports we used to
publish: Each report was required to have the departmental wordmarks at
the top and bottom, the title in a fixed position below the top
wordmarks, and a consistent color scheme for every part of the cover.
But an image area occupying roughly the bottom two-thirds of the page
was left to the designer to fill with a distinctive image. To me, this
represented the ideal situation: consistency where it was useful, and
flexibility where a distinctive solution was useful.
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