Documentation Help Needed

[marjheldard at comcast.net]

First off, I use the following quote from the Apple Publications Style Guide as 
my basic "style" definition:

7. A customary manner of presenting printed material, including usage, 
punctuation, spelling, typography, and arrangement.

Personally, I agree with the "you may need to familiarize yourself with more 
than one style" statement. As a teacher of both English composition and 
technical writing courses (in which I teach a fair bit of "business 
communication" concepts), I find it necessary to use both MLA and APA. When I 
teach an English 2010 course, which is humanities/liberal ed focused, we use 
MLA. When I teach English 2020, which is a science focus, we use APA. 

And then, in my technical writing courses, where I am actually introducing 
students to the world of style and usage guides, I line them all up: Chicago, 
IEEE Standards Style Manual, Microsoft Manual of Style (I don't believe this is 
the exact title...and I understand the guide is being revised...), The Apple 
Publications Style Guide, even the WIRED style guide--just to give the students 
an idea of what is available.

One of my tech comm assignments requires the students to evaluate a 
number of style guides for a specified tech comm scenario. I use everything from 
a technical report to a software program user's guide as the basis for these 
scenarios. One of the websites I give the students as a reference is

http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Style-Guides&skip=0

This site, even though some of the links are somewhat outdated, gives the 
students a good picture of the variety of style publications available. I 
believe the site lists 200+ publications related to style and usage.

Hope this helps. It's just my experience...for what that's worth.

--
Marj Hermansen-Eldard

"The tribute to learning is teaching." --Wise Saying from the Orient