Elements of Style and the documentation-guide

Karsten Wade kwade at redhat.com
Thu Jun 24 17:49:36 UTC 2004


On Thu, 2004-06-24 at 09:35, DaveP wrote:
> At 22:16 23/06/2004, Karsten Wade wrote:
> 
> 
> >As do many organizations, we rely upon the classic "The Chicago Manual
> >of Style"
> 
> 
> Which is very US centric I'm told? Is that right Karsten?

Yes, it's the definitive guide to style for American English.  However,
this is style _not_ prose, so is mainly about font size, header usage,
layout, i.e., presentation.

In looking around how others use TCMoS, it's almost like a hand-wave --
you're really saying, "We rely upon this standard of typography and
presentation."  Just like the DTD called in the XML header, one is
welcome to delve further to understand everything, just as one is
welcome to accept the hand-wave and move on.  After all, this is
DocBook, style is not really the point, that's taken care of in the XSL
and CSS. :)  Proper tagging will be associated with a style that is, de
facto, based on TCMoS.

Okay, so how does this address Paul's question of prose style, grammar,
and so forth?  Apparently, the 15th edition of TCMoS has a new section
on grammar, but I think relying upon The Elements of Style is easier and
better.  Adopting TEoS as a standard for Fedora docs is a good idea. 
Even if we choose not to freely distribute TEoS, we can certainly
reference it.

Here's a proposal -- let's research various online writing guides that
are public domain or covered by a license such as the FDL or Creative
Commons, allowing us to adopt and modify (fork) for our own usage.  See
if we can achieve 70% of our goal the free software way. :)

- Karsten
-- 
Karsten Wade, RHCE, Tech Writer
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