10 Technical Writing Style Guides You Can Use in 2026

In technical writing, consistency builds confidence and creates opportunities to develop communities around documentation. As AI tools become integral to documentation workflows in 2026, following established style guides has become even more critical for maintaining quality and human expertise.

How do you make your technical documentation more consistent? Adhering to a technical writing style guide is essential. A style guide defines communication standards for all technical documents your business produces, covering voice, structure, and technical conventions for text, audio, and images.

Since style guides are comprehensive, they can be challenging to create from scratch. Fortunately, many companies have made their technical writing style guides publicly available and continuously update them for modern documentation needs, including AI integration and translation optimization.

Draft.dev Style Guide

The Draft.dev Technical Blogging Style Guide is a good place to start. It’s used by several technical writers who cover a variety of topics, mainly because it sets down the basics of style decoupled from any context that’s too specific. This guide breaks style into the following four sections:

• Voice: It recommends using the second person (you, yours) to engage the reader and establish a clear point of view.
• Content: The guide recommends a certain structure for blog posts and demonstrates how to support claims with evidence while avoiding plagiarism.
• Conventions: This section sets standards for formatting, such as using Markdown and how to add images to a post.
• Communication: This section emphasizes the importance of keeping in communication with the editor or publisher you’re working with and letting them know of any roadblocks as you write.

As you can see, it’s a technical blog post about how to write a technical blog post—a nice meta style guide.

A List Apart

The style guide from A List Apart is an example of a valuable, reader-centric, but more informal style guide. It offers advice about text formatting, assets like images and author bios, and some notes about how to refine the content itself.

One of the more unique features of this style guide is its discussion of the use of metaphors. A List Apart advocates clarity first. It also suggests following The Chicago Manual of Style and Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage as principal references for proper language usage.

DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean’s Technical Writing Guidelines contains detailed information about how to write compelling technical articles for its Write for DOnations program.

As of 2026, DigitalOcean’s Write for DOnations program is reviewing its backlog and was paused for new topic submissions until 2025. The core technical writing guidelines remain available and continue to be referenced, though the community tutorial submission process has been restructured. The guidelines last received major updates in 2022 and remain relevant for tutorial-style technical documentation.

The four sections of the guide are:

• Style: This is further split into four sections that cover clarity, level of detail, completeness, and tone. It encourages you to write for all technical levels by avoiding assumptions of previous knowledge, giving context for code, and writing “friendly but formal” pieces that show respect for cultural differences.
• Structure: DigitalOcean’s guide is very specific about the desired structure for its articles. This section includes examples for various article types and includes some ready-to-use templates.
• Formatting: This section outlines how writers are expected to format their work using an extended version of Markdown. It provides examples of supported extensions.
• Terminology: DigitalOcean has established some conventions for writing examples, such as a standard default username, default hostnames and domains, and how exactly to indicate to readers where they should alter text with their own input.

DigitalOcean’s technical writing style guide is easy to read and very focused on system administrators and software engineers. The terminology section and linked guides for best practices and code of conduct go a long way toward guaranteeing a high level of quality in the writing.

SUSE Documentation Style Guide

SUSE Documentation Style Guide is a comprehensive and detailed guide to updating documentation for well-established software products like SUSE’s. It starts with simple but powerful advice: define your audience. This sets the level of expertise assumed for the reader and the context in which the documentation will make the most sense.

The guide provides the three following key points about the content itself:

• Avoid promising future features, which are not relevant to the current stable product
• Include warnings on features scheduled for deprecation
• Clarify the status of unsupported features before documenting them

The guide includes more useful details, such as conventions for terminology used in examples (similar to DigitalOcean’s Terminology section) and how to format various content types, like manuals, books, and articles. The defined format is GeekoDoc/DocBook markup language, and the guide includes an extended description of its tags.

The IET Guide to Technical Report Writing

The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), an organization with roots dating back to 1871, provides a concise guide covering many important aspects of technical writing. Its first section provides ten laws of good report writing, which you should definitely keep close when you write. Spoiler alert: the first and last laws are the same—write for your readers.

The guide’s next sections complement those ten rules, with discussions about:

• Objectives: Determining why you are writing and who you are writing for
• Format: How to structure your writing and reference citations
• Writing: The nitty-gritty of writing, including sentence structure, what a paragraph does, and striking the proper tone
• Diagrams: Determining proper placement and facilitating ease of understanding
• Finishing the report: Polishing the piece with summaries, tables of content, and proofreading

In the Writing section, the example about the use of commas is worth noticing for how precise the guide can get:

The engines, which were in perfect running order, had been tested previously. (all engines were in perfect running order and had been tested)
The engines which were in perfect running order had been tested previously. (only the engines in perfect running order had been tested)

Finally, the guide suggests some references like the Oxford Guide to Plain English and Writing for Engineers (Macmillan Study Skills).

Apple Style Guide

The Apple Style Guide was most recently updated in June 2025 and remains available as both a web interface and downloadable PDF (243 pages). It provides comprehensive guidelines for maintaining consistent voice across Apple materials, including documentation, reference materials, training, and user interfaces.

Highlights:

• Extensive glossary covering proper usage of Apple product names and features.
• Tips for writing for international audiences with limited English proficiency.
• Focus on helping human and machine translators localize content effectively.
• Product-specific guidance for referring to Apple ecosystem elements.
• Drop-down navigation for streamlined information access.

The Apple Style Guide references Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary and The Chicago Manual of Style as foundational resources. It encourages technical writers to minimize cultural and language barriers by following international style conventions.

Note: Some Apple departments maintain supplemental guides for specific use cases. The guide is English-only with no Japanese or other language versions currently available.

GitLab Documentation Style Guide

GitLab uses the same guide for members of the GitLab team and its community contributors. The GitLab Documentation Style Guide is a living project with constant evolution, which prevents information silos.

The style guide is managed like a software project, with source code. It includes a set of tests that cover:

• The writing and structure of each article
• Links in the content
• Assets in the content

You can find the specifics of GitLab’s writing style in the Communication section of its team handbook, which defines a list of rules covering a variety of topics, including the use of ubiquitous language and how to properly capitalize GitLab.

GitLab references both Google and Microsoft style guides as supplementary resources while maintaining its documentation-first methodology, making technical documentation the single source of truth for product implementation, usage, and troubleshooting.

Best For: Teams seeking an evolving, community-driven approach with built-in automated quality checks and AI translation optimization.

Google Developer Documentation Style Guide

The Google developer documentation style guide continues to be actively maintained, with the last update in December 2025. The guide has evolved significantly to address AI-powered translation and machine learning systems.

The guide is very dense and has several sections, so here are a few highlights:

• Accessibility: Voice, tone, keyboard navigation, screen reader support, inclusive language, and HTML formatting.
• Language and grammar: Guidance on avoiding anthropomorphizing software products and proper verb forms in API documentation.
• Linking: Standards for creating readable, accessible links.
• Computer interfaces: This section pays special attention to documentation guides for application programming interfaces (APIs).
• Markdown versus HTML: Clarifies that HTML offers more expressiveness despite Markdown’s readability advantages.
• Expanded Definitions: New standards for binary/decimal units, image referencing, and placeholder styling.
• Updated Word List: Continuously refreshed terminology reflecting current technology trends.

Microsoft Writing Style Guide

Many other sources reference the Microsoft Writing Style Guide as a source of answers for technical writing. Some reasons for this include its wide scope (which covers writing content for chatbots and virtual agents) and its sections on content and design planning, scannable content, and selecting words to improve readability and comprehension, among other useful information.

But the heart of the guide is in its definition of voice:

The Microsoft voice is how we talk to people. It’s the interplay of personality, substance, tone, and style.

The Microsoft brand voice has three clearly defined attributes:

• Warm and relaxed
• Crisp and clear
• Ready to lend a hand

You should explore the entire guide to check how these attributes are expressed consistently in each section. It covers scenarios that range from creating a scripted chatbot to writing responsive content for the web. Take note of how the tone can vary depending on the context of the documentation. Your own brand voice should be distinctive and tell your readers what to expect of your company.

Red Hat Technical Writing Style Guide

The Red Hat Technical Writing Style Guide is a comprehensive open-source resource designed for technical writers working on enterprise software documentation. Updated regularly through its GitHub repository, it provides practical guidance for documentation teams.

Key Features:

• Open Source Approach: Available on GitHub with community contributions
• Modular Writing: Guidelines for breaking complex topics into digestible sections
• Inclusive Language: Strong focus on avoiding biased or exclusionary terms
• Screenshot and UI Standards: Detailed guidance for visual elements in documentation
• Command Line Conventions: Specific standards for documenting CLI tools

Best For: Teams documenting open-source projects, enterprise Linux systems, or cloud-native technologies.

Conclusion

After reviewing all the referenced style guides, the common elements remain consistent for 2026:

1. Know your audience and write for them
2. Set your own voice
3. Keep content simple, short, and clear
4. New: Optimize for AI translation and machine comprehension

While these principles provide a foundation, detailed formatting guidelines, glossaries, and standard structures continue to evolve. The most successful documentation teams in 2026 combine established style guide principles with AI-assisted workflows while maintaining human expertise and editorial oversight.

A good starting point is to take the best parts of available resources and build your own custom style guide. As AI tools become more integrated in documentation workflows, maintaining clear human-authored guidelines becomes even more critical for quality control. For more tips on technical content strategy, visit the Draft.dev blog.