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.

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.

There are five important things to watch for in numbered and bulleted lists. If you’re editing according to a style manual such as The Chicago Manual of Style, you’ll have good guidance for many of these things. But even if your style is entirely at your discretion, you’ll still want to think before you list.

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.

If you’re a technical writer, you’re used to handling tricky topics. Maybe you’re teaching system administrators how to set up a new IT platform. Or writing instructions for forklift operators. Or describing how to assemble a gas grill in a way that won’t cause married couples to immediately file for divorce.

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.

Bidding for large EU contracts may seem challenging. However, the process is easier than you think. Moreover, the focus on transparency can work to your advantage. Here’s what you need to understand. EU procurement laws state that contracts over certain values must be advertised through the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU) to select the most economically advantageous bidder to deliver the contract.

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?

If you build your preferences into PerfectIt, then it can help raise writing standards at your organization. If there’s text that you don’t have time to check, you can use PerfectIt to help your colleagues avoid errors. Even on documents that you will check, PerfectIt can help your colleagues identify errors earlier and improve their own writing.

In PerfectIt 4.1, we’ve introduced the Checks to Include tab in the Style Sheet Editor. It lets you set preferences for PerfectIt styles. Now you can control whether a PerfectIt check is included, and what part of a PerfectIt check is included.

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.

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.

People resent being corrected. No matter how big or small the problem is, no one likes to feel scolded. You may be the office editorial expert, but your co-workers won’t welcome unsolicited instruction on how to use software they’ve been using for years; and they certainly don’t want to hear that words they’ve used their whole lives are offensive to company stakeholders.

What should you do if you’re the lone voice of editorial standards in a company full of people who can’t even be bothered to put their dishes in the dishwasher or make sure their garbage hits the wastebasket, let alone follow your style guide?