What is a style guide?
Although Chapter 3 could have covered style guides, I wanted to save them for this chapter and show you how combining them with DocOps practices makes them more useful.
A style guide is a combination of things, and while many writers have encountered them, developers might be less familiar with them. Think of a style guide as comparable to something such as a configuration file for defining rules for JavaScript code with ESLint (https://eslint.org) or Rust with Clippy (https://doc.rust-lang.org/clippy/) but for human language. ESLint and Clippy are “linters,” and as a developer, you’re probably familiar with this code quality improvement concept. Later in this section, I take a style guide and use a linter to enforce it with documentation. This is a practice that is less familiar to writers than developers.
Style guides for human language are nothing new, and while they have existed for centuries in some form, they entered the writing...
