RE: Question about book not keeping to Writing dept. style guide

["Claire Conant" <Claire -dot- Conant -at- Digeo -dot- com>]

This is where a company editor becomes valuable. That editor can
research, set, and enforce the styles - outsourced or not. I suspect
that job falls in your hands.

>From what you've mentioned here, since the document is a revision to an
existing doc it should conform as much as possible - unless you want to
spin it as a completely new and improved version. 

I'd also recommend accepting the addition of table titles. I am a strong
proponent that if you have a lot of tables in your document, they should
be titled, referenced appropriately in preceding text, and a list of
tables provided at the beginning of the book. 

Getting rid of quotation marks is fairly simple using search and
replace, I believe.

You might consider sitting down with the person who did the updating (if
that is possible) and discussing why certain changes were made. Perhaps
they weren't made aware of your style guide, or they have a good reason
for making the change. The reason might be one you would consider
incorporating (such as the table titles). Every style guide has room for
improvement, as does every document. 

Hope this helps.

Claire Conant
Editor, Digeo Inc.

Caroline writes:
Our writing dept has a style guide made over the years by our managers
and added to by various writers  (i.e. although I do not have specific
sources to say why one usage is better than another, this is how all
our books are written).

When I was on maternity leave one of the user guides was outsourced
and while they did use our FrameMaker template, they did not use our
style guide.
As a result many things appear differently in this guide than in our
other guides.
This guide is not a "one-off" guide but for a product being updated.

The types of things that are different here are:
*a different table style is used
*There are table titles (which we do not have in our other guides)
*A lot of quotations marks are used while our style guide calls for
using italics instead of quotation marks as much as possible.
*The way tables, and dialog boxe are introduced is different.

Except for the quotation marks Vs italics I do not think anything here
is wrong usage, but they just make this book different from all of our
other books.

The question is, should I ask one of the writers here to go through
the book and make the appropriate changes so it conforms to our style
guide. I am hesitant because quite a lot of work is involved
especially replacing all of the quotation marks used.
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