If Microsoft were to produce an editorial style guide, what would you expect it to be like? Well, guess what.Microsoft has a style guide, and the three words that best describe its approach are “friendly,” “human,” and “caring.”

The holiday season, celebrated around the world in countless ways, offers us a wonderful opportunity to appreciate the linguistic and cultural richness that defines our global community. 

Microsoft Word. It’s not just a word processor; it’s a vast ocean of features, many of which remain undiscovered by even seasoned users.

Most people wade into the shallows to update a résumé or draft a quick letter. But for those who are ready to explore deeper, there’s a world of advanced tools and hidden gems waiting to transform the way you work.

The biggest news in PerfectIt 6 (at least for style manual geeks like us) is the launch of the Microsoft Writing Style Guide in PerfectIt together with the update for The Chicago Manual of Style, 18^th Edition. We have an entirely separate article about the improvements to PerfectIt styles here. But that’s just the beginning! There’s so much more packed into this new release! We’ve worked hard to add something for everyone.

We partnered with Microsoft to introduce the Microsoft Writing Style Guide in PerfectIt. It’s available to all users in Perfect 6 and PerfectIt Cloud at no additional cost. 

And that’s not the only new style manual included in our new release! PerfectIt 6 now includes The Chicago Manual of Style, 18th Edition. CMOS Online Subscribers get access to rule changes and revisions with the upgrade to PerfectIt 6. 

While not everyone may have been aware of or effected by it, we recently had an outage of PerfectIt Cloud. Now, outages are the worst. You already know that. They mean you can’t access the service you paid for. And they often hit right before a deadline.

One of the most effective quality-control and disaster-prevention tools ever developed is also one of the simplest: the checklist. Surgeons use checklists. Astronauts use checklists. Stage managers use checklists. And editors use checklists.

In December 2022 we launched our Medical Plain Language Summary style. It’s launched in beta as a living document, and we hope that the medical writing community will continue giving us feedback so that we can keep making it more useful for medical communicators working with plain language summaries.

In December 2022 we launched our Medical Plain Language Summary style. It’s launched in beta as a living document, and we hope that the medical writing community will continue giving us feedback so that we can keep making it more useful for medical communicators working with plain language summaries.

Hyphenation can seem like the editor’s party trick. A party trick is something that few people know how to do, and while it’s not that important to most people, it’s always impressive to see someone pull it off. You know, like tying a cherry stem into a knot with your tongue.

Italics are like fancy dress for words. Seeing a word in italics is like going into your local grocery store and seeing someone working there in a samurai costume. “Well,” you think, “you’re certainly here to tell me something.”

Those of us writing business proposals can’t rely on a Hollywood ending. Bid documents require the art of persuasion. That’s more of a challenge for many of us than we would like it to be. So if you’re more concerned about huge grants than Hugh Grant, here are some things to watch out for when writing proposals, bids, and other pieces designed to sell your company to clients.

You’re taking the plunge: you’re setting up as a freelance editor. You’re going to have your own company and you’re going to get clients and edit their text and invoice them and make a good living as a midwife of words. But the first choice you face is a big one: What are you going to name your company?

If you read the title and just said “Don’t you mean Felix Ungar?” then you know you are. The very fact that you’re reading this makes it likely that you’re a Felix. You’re probably an editor, and editors tend to be Felixes (or should that be Felices?).

There are five important things to watch for in numbered and bulleted lists. If you’re editing according to a style manual such as The Chicago Manual of Style, you’ll have good guidance for many of these things. But even if your style is entirely at your discretion, you’ll still want to think before you list.

Here’s a quick test on when to use a and an. Spot the errors: I was at an historic occasion, a meeting at a hotel near an university to discuss an HUD directive, when my recorder ran out of power. For want of an AA battery, my records of the meeting were lost, and it was all consigned to no more than a * in an MS.

How many slip-ups do you count? There are actually six mistakes in there. Let’s see what they are—and why!

It’s important to get a PLS right. When done well, these summaries can improve health literacy in the general public and encourage the pharmaceutical companies that sponsor clinical research to operate more transparently. These eight hacks, adapted from tips by the Plain Language Association International and The Center for Plain Language, will help you master your next PLS.

Sometimes the best way I can help people is to explain exactly what’s happening. In the case of PerfectIt Cloud, I think it’s going to surprise you. But let’s start with the big news that I know you wanted to hear. The Chicago Manual of Style for PerfectIt Has Feature Parity Across Versions.

Here are some ideas for what to do about 42 of the most hated buzzwords.

Before you schedule an interview with your SME, you’ll want to do a bit of homework first. Plopping down in front of them and saying “tell me everything you know” will waste both of your time—and likely won’t get you the focused content you need. Instead, take an organized approach to working with an SME. Here are six steps to guide you through the process.