From Manualfesto to Style Guide

Opportunity Knocks

One of the first projects I volunteered to do at Wacker Neuson was to update the style guide, which was called the “Manualfesto” and had a cartoon caveman on the cover, for the technical writers and turn it into a professional document that could be used by all of our global technical writers for operator’s and service manuals.

My Role

Lead the editing of the style guide, and create a professional document that reflected the Wacker Neuson (WN) brand.

The Process

Starting with our group in the US, I scheduled a month of weekly meetings where we scoured the style guide and eliminated outdated and obscure rules, and generally red inked every page until we were satisfied with the results.

I made each of the updates in FrameMaker, added a simple cover, and added the quote “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough,” by Albert Einstein on the inside of the cover page, along with a note that the style guide is a living document and subject to change without notice. After the first draft was created, I sent it out for a shared peer review to the US and Philippines’ writers using Adobe’s Acrobat, and then made the final round of updates.

Challenges

The biggest challenge to global use of the Style Guide is the language barrier. Communicating with the writers in Germany and Austria often resulted in misunderstandings because they are used to British English versus American English. Words like “hood,” “lift,” and “dazzle” have different meanings. In addition to the language barriers, WN purchased a CMS for global use to make it easier to reuse content between the global branches.

The Result

The final revision of the Wacker Neuson Style Guide for OMs was completed within two months and expanded to almost twice the length of the original Manualfesto. It has since been presented to the writers in Germany and Austria. Although it has not been completely adopted by our European branches, it continues to be used in our North American market and has been a guide for the writers of our Service Manuals.