Here are some of the biggest additions, revisions, and fine-tuning that we’ve undertaken over the last few months to bring PerfectIt up to date with the release of the 18th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style.

Edits of texts by multilingual writers can be heavy, depending on the author’s level of English proficiency. It’s easy to misunderstand their intention or unintentionally erode their voice through personal biases or assumptions. It’s a delicate balancing act between preserving the diversity of multilingual writers’ expression and experience, and ensuring that writing is clear, relevant, and accessible for the audience. This article explores how AI can help editors working with multilingual authors.

The first thing you need for truly great corporate documents is a truly great style guide. Knowing it all off the top of your head is not good enough. You’re not the only person handling the text and you may leave the company someday. More importantly, no human can ever be one hundred percent consistent.

In December 2022 we launched our Medical Plain Language Summary style. It’s launched in beta as a living document, and we hope that the medical writing community will continue giving us feedback so that we can keep making it more useful for medical communicators working with plain language summaries.

It’s time to talk about style, darlings—and specifically about setting the style. You’re the editor now, but the state of the prose in your company is—well, darlings, let’s just say it’s not tidy. Many people have put their own distinctive touches on everything they’ve distinctly touched, and it’s a complete mishmash. Even your company’s name is written four different ways.

If your goal is to get everyone in your organization or group to follow your house style—and to learn the principles behind it—there’s more to it than simply adding terms and adjusting settings in the Style Sheet Editor. The exact words you use to describe the issue make a difference.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shined a spotlight on the World Health Organization (WHO), an intergovernmental organization that works worldwide to promote health, keep the world safe, and serve the vulnerable. As part of their work, WHO publishes a range of documents, from international health standards, to “situation reports” describing progress in fighting a disease, to advice for the public on staying safe and healthy.

Military writing is not just instruction manuals. It includes official correspondence, reports, academic writing projects, contracts, blog posts, press articles and many other genres. The U.S. Army alone lists over forty kinds of official army publications. As technical writers, we can learn a great deal from military style rules. But we also need to understand when and how to deviate from them, to have the right effect.

With 193 member states, the United Nations could probably have 193 different style guides. Fortunately, the organization has settled on just one United Nations Editorial Manual. The comprehensive online guide includes style suggestions for everything from acronyms to numbering of maps and figures.

The GPO Style Manual, last updated in 2016, is the official guide to the form and style of the U.S. Government Publishing Office. The electronic version is free to download. Although designed for use in Federal Government printing and publishing, the GPO Style Manual is relied upon by writers and editors both within and outside the Federal Government.

The Microsoft Writing Style Guide is the go-to style for information technology (IT)–specific communications. The IT audience is large and varied, ranging from help desk staff to chief technology officers. The people that make up that audience come from all over the world and speak many different languages.

Editing has several “golden rules”—plus quite a lot of silver and bronze ones, too—but high on the list is the classic Golden Rule we were taught as children: Treat others as you would have them treat you. What this means, among other things, is take care not to use language that treats some people as intrinsically inferior. Use sensitive language: as inclusive, conscious, and unbiased as possible.

PerfectIt makes it easy to set up a unique style sheet for every client, journal, publishing house, or agency that you work with. However, clients have preferences that overlap; and you probably have some preferences that apply to all clients. So what’s the best way to organize styles in PerfectIt?

When working on European Union (EU) documents, consistency is key. Most documents in all 24 official languages have to be translated into English. That's a lot of text to be made consistent! PerfectIt™ for Word automates how to follow it right within Microsoft Word, with all of the rules built in!

Australian Government Style is the preferred style of writing for most commonwealth, state, territory and local government departments, as well as many universities and private sector organizations. PerfectIt™ for Word automates how to follow it right within Microsoft Word, with all of the rules built in.

The new version of PerfectIt is a bigger deal than that “.1” suggests. As with any new software version, it has lots of small fixes and improvements. However, it has one huge new capability. For the first time, you can control exactly what PerfectIt checks. Now you can turn PerfectIt into a custom checker designed (by you) to lift writing standards at your organization.

Did you know? The first few days in a new job have a lasting impact on engagement, satisfaction and productivity. In order to get a new employee’s best work, your training materials must be effective, immersive, and flawless. This article shows how to make sure your training materials are the best they can be so that new employees at your organization get the best start possible.

American Legal Style is an option in PerfectIt that transforms it into one of the most powerful, yet nuanced, proofreading programs available today for legal professionals.

In publishing and media companies, use of a style guide is the norm. However, style guides can also be useful for any organization that prepares documents for clients and the public. This article is for organizations outside of the publishing industry who can benefit from the introduction of a style guide.

If your work involves more than one style manual, or more than one set of style preferences, you’re going to love the changes in PerfectIt 4 (our Windows edition). The most exciting difference is the introduction of styles based on styles. However, it helps to understand the other changes we’ve made.