I could think of a few examples in which styles can get in the way of friendliness.

1) legal implications — words/phrases we’re not allowed to use because of legal implications. Work around would be to break another rule or be very wordy

2) fancy words/terminologies for marketing sake — the other day, I had a discussion with a colleague regarding the way we refer to specific items both internally as well as in documentation. We create fancy words to distinguish our product from other products. It’s all about “branding.” So my question is whether end-users really understand our language or that they’d prefer simpler more familiar language For example: “input/output” are simple terms. We use “controls/indicators” instead. I end up writing something like “wire the aaa control of xxx to the bbb indicator of yyy. Then wire the ccc controls of yyy to the ddd indicator of zzz.”

3) Passive voice — generally technical documentation should steer as far away from passive voice as possible. But occasionally, I wonder whether we need to turn a simple sentence to a lengthy paragraph just to explain who did the action. Examples: “expected values” “… as shown in the following figure.”

Anyway . . . I agree with you that style guides are good. They’re just annoying sometimes.

Lucky. If I could write the style guide, I’d feel like the king. As we’ve talked about style in our team, it’s reminded me of how thorough they can be. Our organization’s style guide is fairly extensive, and we’re also supposed to use the Chicago Manual of Style for anything not specifically set out in the guide. But we discuss things sometimes that aren’t covered. Some style guides can be brief and cover only a few usage choices and branding, but others can really get down to the nitty-gritty and have a prescription for everything (perhaps like the one Susan mentioned…). I hope yours isn’t a major project all on its own.

Susan,

“User-friendly” is a very broad term. So in some cases, a style guide can enhance user-friendliness because it provides consistency. Consistency breeds familiarity, which in turn breeds friendship, and we’re talking about our products being friends with the users, right? (Just playing on words here…) Do you have any specific instances of style getting in the way of friendliness?

While having a style guide brings a certain order and professionalism to documentation, I wonder whether style guides sometimes get in the way of writing user-friendly documentation. What do you think?

Not only does following a style guide make the site look more professional, but it makes updating the content easier.