An introduction to Word’s styles

I’m a huge fan of using styles in Word. Once you understand how they work, they can save countless hours of tedious formatting. This article from Office-Watch explains, in clear language, what styles are and how they are used: https://office-watch.com/2021/word-styles-from-the-beginning/

It’s worth reading, even if you think you know a lot about styles. And despite using Word for 20+ years, I learnt what a Linked style actually means in practice.

Do I need a style guide?

A client recently asked me if they should have a corporate style guide and whether I could help them with that. They’re a small consulting company, with probably fewer than 30 employees. They write a LOT of reports.

Below is a summary of my response to them.

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I strongly recommend that every company of more than a few people has an in-house style guide, especially if they’re doing a lot of writing. Plus a standard dictionary they use for general terms, and possibly a specialist dictionary for terms used in their industry. Together, these save you from answering questions all the time about whether certain terms are hyphenated or capped, whether to use indents (not for business writing), double spaces (never!), etc. The ‘I’ve always done it like this because my Year 5 teacher told me so’ method of writing for corporate reports etc. is NOT a valid style guide. Times change, language changes, and there’s a good chance the Year 5 teacher got the ‘rule’ from their Year 5 teacher, who got the rule from their Year 5 teacher and so on.

Most in-house style guides are based on an official published style guide, either for the industry, a professional body, or for a publication (e.g. in the US, they mainly use the Chicago Manual of Style or AP for general works). Most style guides will list the dictionary that they base spellings, hyphenation etc. on. In Australia, that’s typically the Macquarie Dictionary, and I would suggest that you take out an annual online subscription to it—it’s pretty cheap, and you don’t have to have the very weighty tome on your desks. I use my Macquarie subscription EVERY day; if it was the hard copy, I’d rarely open it. (https://www.macquariedictionary.com.au/shop/home/?category_selection=True#subscriptions)

In Australia, we have the Australian (government) Style Manual (ASM) that many corporate/industry/professional style guides are based on—it’s available for free online and was recently (2020) updated from the previous printed edition (2002): https://www.stylemanual.gov.au/. There’s also AMOS https://stylemanual.com.au/contents/introduction-amos, which focuses mainly on scientific writing (I’m not a subscriber to AMOS so I don’t know much more about it). AMOS helpfully lists where their guide differs from the ASM: https://stylemanual.com.au/sites/default/files/amos-quickguides-dta_vs_amos-0122dec20.pdf

I’ve created a style guide for [name of corporation]’s health, safety, and environment documents (not shared for client confidentiality reasons). For other clients, I use their in-house style guide for the documents I edit for them. In addition, for some clients I also create a style sheet to go with their edited document that details the choices I made for THAT document that aren’t covered by the style guide. NOTE: A style sheet is specific to a SINGLE document, whereas a style guide applies to ALL documents produced (for example, the style guide might say no apostrophes in geographic names and give a couple of examples, but the style sheet might list all the geographic names used in that document).

It takes a while (several months on and off) to develop a style guide and there’s a lot of back and forth between those involved to nut out and come to agreement on what ‘rules’ you want to enforce (remember, there are no real rules, just traditions and conventions—it’s a guide, not something set in stone). There should only be ONE point of contact in the company for whoever develops your style guide. That contact person discusses style guide issues in meetings with others in the company and relays the decisions back to the person developing the style guide. Be warned—discussions can get HEATED!* (yes, I’ve been there, done that!) And you’ll be surprised how passionate some people are about commas, dashes, and semicolons! And spaces… (all those rules from the various Year 5 teachers over various generations and education systems will come spilling out).

You also need to decide whether you want your style guide to be fully searchable online (as per the ASM), or a printed guide (e.g. PDF) available online. If fully online, that adds another (expensive) layer to the mix as the website for it has to have full text search capabilities and a navigable table of contents.

So, short answer – yes, I can help you develop a style guide, but you have to do a lot of groundwork at your end before you start thinking about producing a document. You need to decide:

• what has to go in it (I’d recommend only variations from the standard ASM, for example; for scope, use the table of contents from the examples I’ve attached as a guide [not attached to this blog post, of course])
• what your corporate (not personal) decision is on all these things, then start noting those decisions for whoever prepares your style guide.

Once you send your notes and decisions to whoever is developing the style guide, they’ll come back to with lots of ‘what about?’ scenarios that you’ll need to make further decisions on. You can save yourself a lot of time and therefore money by sticking to a standard style guide and ONLY using a in-house guide for exceptions/variations or to summarise what’s in the standard style guide.

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Further to this, many style guides, especially those from professional bodies, may include a list of terms and how to write them. In mining/resources/geology, do you write ‘down hole’, ‘down-hole’, or downhole’, and does the word form vary depending on whether you’re using the term as an adjective or a noun? (for an example of a terms list like this, see p50 onwards of the Society of Petroleum Engineers Style Guide: https://www.spe.org/authors/docs/SPE_Style_Guide_2019.pdf). Having a list like this in a style guide, or as an appendix to it, saves a LOT of time for those who are doing the writing, whether they are experienced writers, or just new to the company or industry.

* Some 15 years ago I was working as a technical writer for a software company. They had several programs that they’d developed and were about to start marketing, but there was NO consistency in how they named one particular program. Let’s call it ‘Jet Forms’ — was it ‘Jet Forms’, ‘JetForms’, ‘Jetforms’, ‘Jet-forms’, ‘Jet-Forms’, ‘jetForms’, or any other variation on this? Between the marketing people and the developers and the website content people, I saw almost every variation you could imagine for just this one product name! I raised the inconsistency in a meeting as I had to document this product and thus use the name hundreds of times, and said we HAD to make a firm decision on what to call it so that EVERYONE used the same term to avoid confusing our customers. We had 8 people in that meeting (2 of whom were the owners of the company), and I couldn’t believe they spent an hour discussing it! It cost the company 8 hours of wages while we haggled over a single word. And no, some 15 years on, I can’t recall what they decided, but I certainly recall the long discussion that was a waste of time and money when just one of the owners should have said, ‘It’s xxx’, and we’d have been done.

Word: Doubled-up user name in comments

Here’s a strange one Adrienne M in one of my editors’ Facebook groups was able to solve for me a couple of weeks ago.

One of my clients (Dr Jun X) was getting a double-up of his first name in his comments. Just his first name, not his surname or his ‘Dr’ title.

I got him to try these things:

• Check the User name setting under File > Options > General. It was fine.
• Modify the XML file to change the reviewer’s name (using parts of these instructions: https://cybertext.wordpress.com/2013/04/10/word-removing-reviewer-names/), and that seemed to work, but doesn’t hold for a new document he tested a comment on, as I expected.
• Do a Registry search for his doubled-up name in case it was lurking somewhere in the bowels of the system (last resort, and not done as we found a solution).

He thought it might be a conflict between a global name that he’s used for Microsoft products vs the internal name set by Word (I wasn’t sure what he meant by that). I also asked him if he’d only ever opened this document locally, or if he’d worked on it in the online version of Word. Or if it had come from someone else use Word for Mac. Yes, I was clutching at straws…

I then posted the question on one of the editors’ Facebook groups and a few people came back suggesting it was likely a conflict between various Microsoft account credentials (which didn’t surprise me—I have several: my own, plus different ones with different clients and Microsoft just CANNOT deal with that! It’s so bad trying to find anything with the various credentials that I refuse to use OneDrive etc. as I invariably have a different login for it than I thought or that Microsoft wants me to use. I think Microsoft assumes everyone only works for one employer and therefore only needs one credential, but we freelancers work with many clients, which potentially means different credentials for each organisation—it’s all very confusing and Microsoft certainly doesn’t make it easy. But I digress…)

The different Microsoft accounts was the trigger that Adrienne needed to point us in the right direction. Underneath the username area in the Options is a checkbox for Always use these values regardless of sign in to Office (how have I never noticed it before???) Checking that box solved the problem. My client said: ‘I went back and ticked that option and it solved the problem. To test, I then went back and unticked it and the problem comes back.’ Thanks Adrienne!

Using personal pronouns in corporate and academic writing

There’s an unwritten rule (no doubt written, in some places) that you should never use personal pronouns (we, us, I, our, etc.) in corporate or academic writing. Instead, you need to use the third person (e.g. ‘the authors’), or eliminate altogether the person or organisation responsible. Blog posts are different—they’re more informal, so using personal pronouns is accepted there.

But why not everywhere?

I certainly don’t have an answer for that, but saying ‘it’s traditional’, ‘that’s how it’s always been done’, ‘that’s the rule’ just doesn’t cut it, in my opinion.

I’m sure the plain language people, and others, have done studies on this, but it was brought to mind when a client asked What are your thoughts on using personal pronouns in a scientific publication? I’ve occasionally seen it but it’s an unwritten rule that scientific publications are written from the point of view of a third party.

Their question reminded me of a 300p government report on hydrogeology I’d edited recently, which DID use personal pronouns. It was a refreshing change! As I wrote back to that client: ‘… I also like how you used ‘we’, ‘our’ etc. in a government report—it made it much more readable, and far easier to edit because I wasn’t trying to figure out or add who (person, department, role) was responsible for doing things.’

An example from that 300p report (‘we’ refers to the authors of the report):

‘We measured the initial groundwater level in all bores …

Before 2016, we had opportunistically monitored ….

Because the water levels in bore [XYZ] were likely to be tidally influenced, we recorded water levels hourly …’

Back to corporate/government writing… Often the third person is used to hide the person/entity responsible for an action or a response, and it may be quite deliberate. Government and corporate reports are very good at this—it’s CYA* at its best! By saying something was (or should be) done, but never saying WHO did it or is to do it, or WHO is responsible for any actions arising from it, no-one bears responsibility if it fails. The proverbial buck can be passed around forever, without ever stopping on someone’s desk.

My recommendation: Unless your style guide (in-house, external) says otherwise, consider using personal pronouns in your corporate/government/academic writing. And if your in-house style guide says not to, question WHY the authors of the style guide recommend this. ‘It’s tradition’ is not an acceptable answer, in my opinion. Your responsibility as a writer or editor is to your readers and ensuring they can not only read but also comprehend the material they’re reading.

* CYA = cover your arse (‘ass’ for those in the US)

Best. Unsolicited. Testimonial. Ever

One of my geology clients wrote a LinkedIn article that both praised me enthusiastically AND promoted the use of editors (October 2021). The article is here: What to do when the write right words won’t come out, and a PDF of it is saved here.

Two other clients also added their praises for my work in their comments for that LinkedIn article; my client had referred me to both of them in the past year:

• We worked with Rhonda Bracey on a major project in the past year and had a fabulous experience – we all agreed that having a professional editor was worth the additional cost. (JL, Canada, minerals exploration company)
• Rhonda is a godsend Jun! I’m so grateful you put me onto her! This article is great; shows everyone they CAN share their ideas and contribute to our science, even if they lack the confidence in writing to do so – they just need to source the right help! Love it (MH, Perth, structural geologist)

Yes, I blushed! But I think I might be able to put that imposter syndrome to bed now.