When lawyers spend more time efficiently using Microsoft Word, and less time fighting it, everyone benefits. Lawyers can spend more time drafting arguments rather than drafting documents.

Today, The Chicago Manual of Style moves into proofreading software for the first time. I’m delighted to say that PerfectIt will be its platform. Whether the Manual is part of your work or the basis of your organization’s house style, The Chicago Manual of Style for PerfectIt will give you a new level of confidence in the text you deliver.

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.

Are your legal documents showing their age? That’s the question that the Association of Corporate Counsel asked. If you’re reading this, then you probably already know that it’s time to update your form documents and bring them into the modern era.

American Legal Style now consists of more than 125,000 corrections for legal users—that’s four times as many corrections as were available just six months ago. Here’s the story behind the improvements.

For professional editors, climbing to the top of their field and staying there is challenging. Being consistently good at your job means you will have returning clients who will, hopefully, refer others to you.

Knowing your audience is critical in technical writing. If your content isn’t catered to the right audience, your readers may be turned off by your copy. They may not understand the critical information you’re trying to convey. And if you have to rewrite your copy? That’s a waste of time, resources, and effort. So how do you tailor content to specific audiences? Here’s a three-step process for learning about your audience and producing content specific to their needs.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shined a spotlight on the World Health Organization (WHO), an intergovernmental organization that works worldwide to promote health, keep the world safe, and serve the vulnerable. As part of their work, WHO publishes a range of documents, from international health standards, to “situation reports” describing progress in fighting a disease, to advice for the public on staying safe and healthy.

The importance of good writing in technical grant proposals is significantly underestimated. Have a thought for the grant review committees. Reviewing 40 or 50 grant applications for three or four funding opportunities is depressing enough, but when they are written by scientists, engineers and tech people with few writing skills, it can be agony. Are you surprised that grant proposal reviewers respond better to well-written proposals?

Spellcheck is one of the most basic checks that editors and writers run on their documents. But those same editors and writers will tell you that spellcheck doesn’t always know what to do with complex or unusual terms like drug names.

Military writing is not just instruction manuals. It includes official correspondence, reports, academic writing projects, contracts, blog posts, press articles and many other genres. The U.S. Army alone lists over forty kinds of official army publications. As technical writers, we can learn a great deal from military style rules. But we also need to understand when and how to deviate from them, to have the right effect.

Technical writing can be a challenge. Often, you’re exploring a new topic—say, overhead cranes that are used to move heavy items around factory floors.

With 193 member states, the United Nations could probably have 193 different style guides. Fortunately, the organization has settled on just one United Nations Editorial Manual. The comprehensive online guide includes style suggestions for everything from acronyms to numbering of maps and figures.

If you’re a technical writer, you’re used to handling tricky topics. Maybe you’re teaching system administrators how to set up a new IT platform. Or writing instructions for forklift operators. Or describing how to assemble a gas grill in a way that won’t cause married couples to immediately file for divorce.

The GPO Style Manual, last updated in 2016, is the official guide to the form and style of the U.S. Government Publishing Office. The electronic version is free to download. Although designed for use in Federal Government printing and publishing, the GPO Style Manual is relied upon by writers and editors both within and outside the Federal Government.

One event of 2020 that might have passed you by: using two spaces after a period is now officially a formatting error. At least, according to Microsoft. The extra space is now marked with a blue squiggly line. This may not have been the biggest news this year. However, it’s a joyful win in a long, painful battle between the die-hard double-spacers, relics from the time of typewriters and fixed-width fonts, and typographers, and their supporters, who feel passionately that the additional space is an insult to modern font designers.

Bidding for large EU contracts may seem challenging. However, the process is easier than you think. Moreover, the focus on transparency can work to your advantage. Here’s what you need to understand. EU procurement laws state that contracts over certain values must be advertised through the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU) to select the most economically advantageous bidder to deliver the contract.

The Microsoft Writing Style Guide is the go-to style for information technology (IT)–specific communications. The IT audience is large and varied, ranging from help desk staff to chief technology officers. The people that make up that audience come from all over the world and speak many different languages.