PerfectIt 6 Launches in Style
By Daniel Heuman
We partnered with Microsoft to introduce the Microsoft Writing Style Guide in PerfectIt. It’s available to all users in Perfect 6 and PerfectIt Cloud at no additional cost.
And that’s not the only new style manual included in our new release! PerfectIt 6 now includes The Chicago Manual of Style, 18th Edition. CMOS Online Subscribers get access to rule changes and revisions with the upgrade to PerfectIt 6.
In fact, there are so many improvements in PerfectIt 6 that I’m splitting them into two separate posts! If you want to read about all the other improvements, that post is here. Continue reading here to learn all about what we’ve done with styles.
Launching Microsoft Style for PerfectIt
The Microsoft Writing Style Guide is not just an internal guide used by Microsoft. It is one of the most important styles for technical writers everywhere.
The Microsoft Writing Style Guide has its roots in the Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications. That guide, first published in 1995, had a fourth edition in 2012. That makes it one of the oldest and most widely followed style manuals for technical writers. Today, Microsoft regularly updates the Microsoft Writing Style Guide online.
The Microsoft Writing Style Guide, like other good style manuals, doesn't try to cover everything. For issues that it doesn’t cover, it uses The Chicago Manual of Style as its reference style. PerfectIt allows CMOS Online subscribers to enforce Microsoft style as truly intended by combining The Chicago Manual of Style and the Microsoft Writing Style Guide.
To deliver the Microsoft Writing Style Guide in PerfectIt, we worked directly with Microsoft and took guidance from some of the original authors at Minden Editorial. We're delighted to offer the style for free to all PerfectIt subscribers at no extra cost. If you’re interested in technical details for how we developed it, our analytical linguist has written about that here.
The Chicago Manual of Style, 18th Edition
If your social media feed is anything like mine, you’ve probably seen a big yellow book next to a smiling editor on more than one occasion in the past few months. That’s right! The release of a new edition of The Chicago Manual is big news in the editing world and we are proud to be a part of it.
There are already an incredible number of resources for learning about the changes in the new edition. Here are a few of the best:
The announcement of the new edition (including key changes) from University of Chicago Press.
An interview with Chief Reviser of the Manual in this Grammar Girl video.
Erin Brenner’s deep dive into the updates.
It’s not possible to include every change to the Manual in PerfectIt, but improvements that we have made to The Chicago Manual of Style for PerfectIt include:
Masthead capitalization: Automatically adjust capitalization to match hundreds of popular mastheads to ensure your titles reflect current standards without extra effort.
Title case: We’ve updated the style to fit the Manual’s new rules on title case.
Complex compounds and time zones: We’ve expanded our wildcard checks to include complex compounds and time zone accuracy for precision and efficiency.
Adverbial compounds: You’ll see updated hyphenation rules for more accuracy, making your text cleaner and more aligned with CMOS standards.
Our analytical linguist, Chris Ryder, had the pleasure of working with Russell Harper directly to deliver the style. You can read about all of the work and everything that has gone into the style here.
Improved styles
We’ve also updated and improved lots of the styles in PerfectIt. Here are the details.
American Legal Style
Ivy Grey is the author of PerfectIt’s American Legal Style. She has recategorized existing checks to make things clearer and added additional checks for formatting of legal citations. In addition, American Legal Style now includes more checks for writing style issues, such as reducing legalese and jargon, Latin and French phrases, incomplete edits, and subject-verb agreement. More terms and Bluebook updates are forthcoming. Ivy is also the Chief Strategy & Growth Officer for WordRake, so we’re grateful to the entire team there for her assistance.
United Nations Style
We’ve gone all the way back through the updates to the United Nations Editorial Manual Online in order to bring PerfectIt’s checking right up to date. The result is a significantly improved style that should help with enforcing documents across UN organizations.
European Union Style
There are just a few small changes to our European Union Style. Most users won’t notice the differences. However, we’re thankful to the EU’s Directorate General for Translation for continuing to give us feedback that lets us improve how we enforce the style.
Want Even More Details?
Our analytical linguist is preparing a deep dive that covers all of the improvements in more depth. Make sure you subscribe to our mailing list to get all of the details.
Get the download
If you’re a PerfectIt subscriber, you can get the latest update for free.
Windows users: Click for instructions.
Mac users: All styles improvements and other updates will be available automatically from November 2024 onwards. Just run PerfectIt Cloud as normal and you’ll get the changes as soon as they go live.
More than just style improvements
This post is all about the style changes. However, there’s lots more to PerfectIt 6. You can read all about our other improvements here.