Microsoft Writing Style Guide

This section includes some rules I learned when reading the Microsoft Writing Style Guide.

Top 10 tips

1. Use bigger ideas, fewer words.
2. Write like you speak.
3. Project friendliness, i.e., use You're instead of You are.
4. Get to the point fast.
5. Be brief.
6. Use sentence-style capitalization by default.
7. Skip periods (and : ! ?). Skip end punctuation on titles, headings, subheads, UI titles, and items in a list that are three or fewer words.
8. Remember the last comma when you list three or more items.
9. Don’t be spacey. Use only one space after periods, question marks, and colons—and no spaces around dashes
10. Revise weak writing. Start each statement with a verb.