A style guide is useful for writers, editors, developers, and bug reporters. By listing the preferred acceptable variant for terms and grammar rules, it makes it easier for multiple people to be consistent. The guide also helps bug reporters provide a correction for text errors they find and a basis for this objection.
A guide can also act a simple first point of reference for basics of grammar and for spelling of technical terms that may not be found in a normal dictionary. Instead of each person maintaining an extensive personal library of resources, the guide can be expanded to contain the information most commonly needed by multiple users, such as the correct capitalization and spelling of a program name used often in documentation.
The style guide can additionally provide information about the structure to use in documents or help texts. For program texts, it can specify the part of speech or phrase type to use for certain elements and what capitalization style should be used.
When terminology is used more consistently, it is easier for translators to use the correct translation for each term. To help the translators, the program text guide includes guidelines for developers for the variables and comments to include in program texts. This streamlines the translation procedure and decreases the number of questions and errors.
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