Is the new Microsoft Manual of Style for you?

The 4th edition of the Microsoft Manual of Style (MMoS) has been updated substantially in a few crucial areas. It’s indispensable, if you work in a Microsoft domain and worth checking out if not. Full disclosure: I’ve received a free review copy. The previous edition of 2004 was becoming quite dated, so a new edition [...]

4 benefits of peer editing documentation

Peer editing is the second best thing to hiring a professional editor and brings additional benefits to your tech comm team. At our company, we technical communicators and some QA analysts all collaborate on Release Notes for our product. It’s a complex financial application, so our Release Notes go to some lengths to explain to [...]

Use a style guide as a strategic tool

You can use a corporate style guide to enforce the strategic development of your documentation. That’s my observation as we’re currently moving towards structured, topic-based authoring. The reasons for the move are pretty much the usual ones: To offer more consistent, less redundant documentation that’s easier to use, more efficient to create and maintain and [...]

Improve documentation with quality metrics

Quality metrics for technical communication are difficult, but necessary and effective. They are difficult because you need to define quality standards and then measure compliance with them. They are necessary because they reflect the value add to customers (which quantitative metrics usually don’t). And they are effective because they are the only way to improve [...]

Ragged-right or justified alignment?

Which alignment on the printed page is better: Ragged-right or justified? It seems that ragged-right is preferable, at least in some circumstances. Today, I’m re-posting a piece that I first published on April 23, 2009, on the now defunct Content Wrangler site and then moved it to this blog as legacy material that was buried [...]