Fedora Documentation Style Guide

[Edward Haddock]

On Tue, 2006-07-04 at 04:45 -0500, Patrick W. Barnes wrote:
> Between the assorted websites and documents of the Fedora Project, we have 
> many different writing styles in use, and we have many documents that have 
> different styles within them or contain many simple errors.  Our established 
> Documentation Guide features a chapter on style, but it doesn't go into the 
> sort of depth that we really need, and I don't know that it really should.
> 
> As such, I have begun work on a new Fedora Documentation Style Guide.  This 
> will become a comprehensive guide to style that will answer many questions, 
> including some that haven't even been asked, about the writing style that 
> should be used for Fedora's documentation and websites.
> 
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DocsProject/StyleGuide
> 
> I intend to refer heavily to the Associated Press Stylebook, the Chicago 
> Manual of Style, the existing Documentation Guide, the GNOME Documentation 
> Style Guide, the style guides of a few universities and assorted other 
> resources.
> 
> At this time, I would be happy to accept specific suggestions for this guide.  
> I'll be bringing questions to this list as I get further into the writing.  
> There are a few style decisions that I believe we should make as a team.  At 
> first, this document will probably reflect my own writing style very 
> strongly, so if anything about my writing style bothers you, now is the time 
> to point it out to me.  ;-)
> 
> One of the first points we might address would be the proper location of 
> punctuation with quotations or parenthesis.  I often place periods and commas 
> outside of such blocks (like this), rather than inside.  I find this better 
> suited for technical writing, since it avoids accidental inclusion of that 
> punctuation where it doesn't belong, but I realize that it is a bit 
> non-standard.  When the punctuation is actually a part of the block, I do 
> include it inside the block, because that's "doing the right thing."  
> Thoughts?
> 
> I was a bit torn about where to put this draft, and selected a sub-page of the 
> DocsProject page.  It can be moved later, but I felt that this was the most 
> appropriate location, since this document will be targeted at the 
> Documentation team and not at the community as a whole.  If others have 
> competing viewpoints, I don't have my heart set on this location.  ;-)
Aloha,
    I have been working on the Documentation guide specifically on the
section that deals with setting up accounts and the tool chain. Maybe
this could be added to the Documentation guide as a reference or primer
on how to write with a style fro the Documentation Project. 
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DocsProject/DocumentationGuide
	Together the two would give new volunteers the needed information on
how to setup and use accounts and mail lists and show them a broad sense
of style to help maintain a consistency throughout the Documentation.
There is Section VII which is labeled Style Guidelines. 
	On that same page I did section II. B. but I can't figure out how to
get the numbers to carry on correctly after the Code piece. Any thoughts
or suggestions would be much appreciated.
Mahalo,
Edward
> 
> -- 
> Patrick "The N-Man" Barnes
> nman64 at n-man.com
> 
> http://www.n-man.com/
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