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Red Hat Technical Writing Style Guide

(stylepedia.net)
184 points jumpocelot | 1 comments | 10 Jul 25 15:01 UTC | HN request time: 0.375s | source
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david422 ◴[10 Jul 25 18:07 UTC] No.44523818[source]▶
This seems like one of the perfect use cases for AI. Have the AI ingest the style guide, and then comment on your written work to point out where your work does not adhere to the style guide.
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kaycebasques ◴[10 Jul 25 18:16 UTC] No.44523919[source]▶
Lots of people have tried it. The problem is the sheer number of rules in a typical technical writing style guide. I continue to believe that a fine-tuned model is the way to go, and I made a lot of progress on that front, but I learned firsthand how labor-intensive feature engineering can be.

The most reliable non-fine-tuned method I have seen is to do many, many passes over the doc, instructing the LLM to focus on only one rule during each pass.

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1. smarx007 ◴[10 Jul 25 21:16 UTC] No.44525710[source]▶
I had moderate success using https://www.iso.org/ISO-house-style.html converted to markdown and narrowed to the guidelines starting with "Plain English" and ending before "Conformity and conformity-related terms" (plus a few other rules up to and including "Dates"). A quick estimate puts the whole Markdown document at 9869 tokens - quite manageable. I generally prefer the style of the Microsoft Writing Style Guide but ISO house style is the only one that fits nicely into a prompt.

Looking forward to your model/product!

P.S. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/style-guide/technical-content-a-... also looks useful