Shanghai Tech WriterTechnical Writing, Technology, Web2.0, Google, Shanghai, China

It’s about time that I start a series on NI Style Guide. NI Style Guide is the Bible of technical writing at National Instruments. The style guide is a reference tool for all technical writers to follow so that we can present (document) information clearly and consistently. There are many reference books on grammar and style, but that’s not what the NI Style Guide is about. Rather, it is a guideline that addresses specific and content-related issues such as the use of acronyms, referencing product names, word choice, user interface, addressing/instructing users, organization and structure, etc… We don’t want our documentation to look like they were written by several people even though that’s the case. NI believes in providing documentation of the highest quality. Thus, all NI technical writers have to follow strict guidelines when writing documentation.

The NI Style Guide is several hundred pages, and I’ve been studying it since I started working at NI several weeks ago. The first time I read through the style guide, most of it exited the other end. There were too many guidelines to remember and I hadn’t start documenting/editing anything yet. That was several weeks ago. Since then, I’ve started working on a documentation project and have had some experience reviewing/editing existing documentation. Some of the style guide rules are coming back to me and making more sense. I decided to take some time and read through the style guide once again, and this time, I found some interesting rules that I want to comment on. I will add a few posts to this series addressing some of the style guide issues that tech writers have come across. Please visit regularly for more posts in this series.