Read or Download Microsoft® manual of style : your everyday guide to usage, terminology, and style for professional technical communications PDF

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Not Microsoft style When you lock down your computer... Principles of Microsoft style 7 Don’t convert verbs to nouns and nouns to verbs. 1 Microsoft style To protect your computer with a password... To connect... Open the invitation. Not Microsoft style To password-protect your computer... To establish connectivity... Open the invite. Sentence structure and grammatical choices Because users scan text, make every word count. Concise, simple sentences and paragraphs save space and can be the most effective means of conveying important ideas and actions.

2 Task analysis Task analysis—understanding what your customers need to do and how they’re using your content to do it—is another way of evaluating your content. In general, the task analysis process is as follows: ■■ Identify the top tasks that customers need to complete by using your content. ■■ Have participants use your content to do the tasks. ■■ Use metrics to measure their success rates. Some metrics include the following: ■■ Task completion rate ■■ Disaster rate (percentage of failed attempts) ■■ Time it takes to complete the task After you have identified areas of weakness in your content based on task analysis, you can make changes and remeasure as necessary to achieve an optimal success rate.

Avoid superfluous words. ” For white papers and other long articles, indicate the length of the document. Chapter 2 Content for the web Tags “Tags” are keywords and terms chosen by the content’s creator or by other users of the item ­(depending on the system) to classify the content. Tags are a kind of metadata that helps c­ ustomers find the content by browsing or searching. Tags are often specific to the systems in which the content is published. That is, tags are useful within a specific wiki, but do not necessarily increase ­discoverability from external search engines.

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