Project
Style guide for Financial Services division of Arkansas Blue Cross Blue Shield, including project proposal memo and project reflection (manual cover piece)

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Program Objective
This style guide demonstrates how I meet the following program objectives:

• demonstrating mastery of my craft through attention to detail

• analyzing a wide range of rhetorical situations and create documents that will work best in each particular situation

• understanding the history and major theories of my profession; knowing how the rules of my craft were shaped and how they are changing

• participating in the profession beyond the classroom 

• conducting myself as a professional at all times, representing the profession well

 

Creating this style guide required me to go in depth about how I wanted my division’s documentation to look. Certain design principles and theories should be followed, but we also have to cater to your client or boss’ needs and desires. Sometimes this can cause conflict, but it is important to know rhetorical theory and spelling/grammar rules so that we can stand our ground. However, at the same time, we must conduct ourselves professionally and remember that the client’s needs come first.

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Context
This style guide was created for the Financial Services division at Blue Cross and Blue Shield as part of a class project for Dr. Cindy Nahrwold’s Technical Style and Editing class. Each student was asked to create a style manual for a local business or organization. The documentation I create at Blue Cross is often long and detailed. Documents serve as step-by-steps for various accounting software and functions. It is important that all documents be consistent. A style guide gives consistency and guidelines to documentation. If there are any discrepancies about formatting a document, a writer can refer to the style manual. If an issue arises that isn’t addressed in the manual, a new standard can be created and added to the manual for future reference.

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Audience
Mainly technical writers in the BCBS Financial Services division will refer to this guide, but the document is available for any employee in our division to view and/or use. 

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Process
I wrote a proposal memo to outline my goals and plan for the project. At the time, I had just started working at Blue Cross part-time after being an intern that summer. I worked with another technical writer. She had some standards in place, but no manual per se. I saw this as an opportunity to create a manual that we could use at work that could also be used for this project. When the project was completed, I wrote a cover piece to reflect on the project and explain the rhetorical choices that I had made when creating the manual. 

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When I turned my manual in for grading, it had a pretty big issue — all of the pictures were placed before the text. This caused me to get a lot of points deducted on my grade and made the manual difficult to read and understand. About a year later, our technical writing team at BCBS decided to revamp all of our documents. So I saw this as the perfect opportunity to reformat the style guide I had created for Tech Style & Editing; this time following the correct design principles regarding images and text. However, some elements of the manual, such as the image captions, still went against best design practices at the request of the client.