Choosing a Technical Writing Style Guide: Google vs Microsoft vs IBM
A style guide is the difference between documentation that feels like one authoritative voice and documentation that reads like it was written by fifteen strangers, because it usually was. When a reader jumps from a tutorial to an API reference to a troubleshooting page, consistency in terminology, formatting, and tone is what keeps them oriented. A technical writing style guide encodes thousands of small decisions once, so no one has to relitigate whether it is "log in" or "login" in every pull request.
The good news is you almost never need to write one from scratch. Three mature, free, industry-standard guides already exist, and the right move for most teams is to adopt one and layer a thin house supplement on top. This article compares those guides, shows how to build the delta that makes them yours, and covers enforcement so the guide is a living tool rather than a forgotten wiki page. New to the discipline? Our beginner's guide to technical writing sets the foundation.
Why Every Docs Team Needs a Style Guide
Without a shared standard, every writer defaults to personal preference, and every reviewer wastes cycles on subjective disputes. A style guide converts opinion into settled policy: capitalization, oxford commas, code-formatting conventions, how to write UI element names, when to use notes versus warnings, and how to handle numbers and units. Those decisions are individually trivial and collectively enormous, and litigating them per document does not scale past two or three writers.
The deeper payoff is trust. Consistent documentation signals a mature product, and inconsistency quietly erodes confidence in the accuracy of the content itself. If the docs cannot agree on what to call the main button, a reader reasonably wonders what else is wrong. A style guide also accelerates onboarding, because a new writer or an occasional contributing engineer has one place to answer "how do we write this here." For how consistency ties to measurable quality, see our guide on measuring success with style guides.
The Big Three: Google, Microsoft, IBM
The Google developer documentation style guide is concise, opinionated, and web-native. It favors conversational-but-precise second person, strong guidance on inclusive language, and clear rules for code-in-text. It is an excellent default for software products, developer tools, and API docs, and its brevity makes it easy to actually read end to end.
The Microsoft Writing Style Guide is broader and deeper, covering UI writing, chat and voice interfaces, accessibility, and a large A-to-Z term list; it suits product organizations documenting complex GUIs. The IBM Style guide (available as a book) is the most comprehensive and formal, strong on structured authoring, globalization, and highly regulated or enterprise contexts. A practical rule of thumb: pick Google for developer-first products, Microsoft for GUI-heavy consumer software, and IBM when you need rigor, translation readiness, and enterprise governance.
Building a House Style Guide on Top
Adopting a base guide does not mean you are finished; it means you now only have to document the differences. Your house style guide should be short and cover only what the base guide omits or where you deliberately diverge: your product's exact terminology, your capitalization of feature names, your supported code languages and formatting, your policy on screenshots, and your rules for versioning and deprecation notices. Anything the base guide already answers should not be repeated, only referenced.
Keep the house guide in the same repository as your docs, in Markdown, under version control, so it evolves through pull requests like any other artifact. A terminology table is the single highest-value component: a two-column list of preferred term, forbidden alternatives, and a note on why. This is what a linter will later enforce automatically, and it is what prevents the slow drift where "sign in," "login," and "log on" all coexist across your docs.
Voice, Tone, and Global English
Voice is your consistent personality; tone flexes with context. A confident, plain voice suits nearly all technical documentation, but tone should shift between a celebratory quickstart and a serious security advisory. Document both: describe your voice in three or four adjectives with examples, then give tone guidance for error messages, warnings, and marketing-adjacent overview pages so writers know when warmth is appropriate and when it is noise.
Because most documentation is read globally and often by non-native English speakers, write in what the industry calls Global English: short sentences, one idea per sentence, consistent terminology, and no idioms or cultural references. Avoid ambiguous constructions like "once" (does it mean "after" or "one time"), and prefer active voice with clear agents. This discipline also makes content cheaper and more accurate to translate, which our best practices guide connects directly to localization cost.
Enforcing the Guide With Linters
A style guide no one enforces is a wish list. The solution is prose linting, and the standard tool is Vale, a fast, configurable linter that checks text against rules you define. Vale ships with ready-made rule packages for the Google and Microsoft style guides, so you can enforce hundreds of conventions on day one, then add custom rules from your terminology table to flag forbidden terms, passive voice, or banned jargon.
Wire Vale into your continuous integration pipeline so every documentation pull request is checked automatically, exactly as code is linted. Writers get feedback in seconds, reviewers stop policing commas, and the guide becomes self-reinforcing. Start with rules set to "suggestion" severity to avoid overwhelming contributors, then promote the most important ones to "error" over time as the team adjusts.
Keeping the Guide Alive
A style guide is a product with users, and like any product it decays without maintenance. Assign a clear owner, review it on a regular cadence, and treat every recurring style dispute in review as a signal that the guide has a gap to fill. When a new decision is made, record it immediately so it is never re-argued. The guide should grow through use, capturing real decisions rather than anticipating hypothetical ones.
To make adoption faster, Darlo Technical Writing offers a Style Guide Foundations course that walks teams through selecting a base guide, writing the house delta, and configuring Vale end to end, plus a downloadable house-style-guide template with a pre-built terminology table and linter config. Explore them at /courses, and pair them with our article on measuring style-guide success to prove the return on the effort.
House Style Guide Starter Template + Vale Config
A ready-to-fork Markdown house style guide with a pre-built terminology table, voice-and-tone section, and a working Vale configuration you can drop into CI to enforce it automatically.
Can I just use Google's style guide without writing my own?
Yes, and many small teams do exactly that. Adopt Google's guide as your base and only add a short house supplement for your product's specific terminology and formatting decisions. You avoid a large writing project and still get consistency from day one.
How is a style guide different from a template?
A style guide governs how you write, sentence-level conventions, terminology, tone, and formatting. A template governs the structure of a document, its sections and order. You need both; the style guide keeps prose consistent while templates keep document types consistent.
How do I get engineers to follow the style guide?
Automate it. Engineers will not memorize a wiki page, but they will respond to a linter like Vale that flags issues in their pull request in seconds. Enforcement through tooling scales where manual policing does not.