Project
Style guide for The Good Grid (TGG), including project proposal memo and 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

• ability to analyze 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

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Creating this style guide allowed me to develop all documentation rules and guidelines from scratch for this organization. I had to be knowledgeable in documentation standards and best practices in order to create appropriate styles and formatting that aligned with the organization's brand. This organization was a start-up, and the CEO was passionate about her company and the way the documentation should look. Even though we did not see eye-to-eye on what some of the best practices should be, I maintained a high level of professionalism and work to complete the project to my client’s standards. 

 

Context
This style guide was created to establish documentation standards for The Good Grid. TGG is a one-stop ecosystem for delivering services to returning citizens to systematically address and reduce recidivism in the state of Arkansas. Basically, they provide resources and assistance to people who have recently been released from incarceration in order to help them re-integrate into society.  

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I participated in an internship with TGG from March to July 2018 to fulfill my internship/cognate requirement for my M.A. under the supervision of Dr. Cindy Nahrwold. My responsibility was to document processes on their website for their clients and for employee training purposes. But before I could get started on this, I needed to get some documentation standards in place. After seeing the style manual that I created for Blue Cross Blue Shield, TGG’s CEO requested that I make one for her organization.  

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Audience
I created this style guide for myself while I was a technical writing intern. When I left, it was used by the business analyst and web developer that I worked with so they could maintain consistency in their documentation.

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Process
Similarly to the style guide project at Blue Cross, I wrote a proposal memo describing my employer, their documentation needs, my editing goals, and my work plan. The style manual I created for the Good Grid was pretty basic and just covered simple formatting and style choices. I’ll admit that it’s a little colorful, but the CEO wanted to incorporate all of the organization’s colors in the manual somehow. We went back and forth a little about some of the rhetorical choices that I wanted to make in the manual. I tried to stand my ground if I knew that something should be done a certain way and tried to back up my decisions with rhetorical or design theory that I had learned in school. However, sometimes she did not see it my way and I had to make decisions that went against what I was taught in class. For example, she did not seem to understand the importance of a style sheet and told me not to worry about creating one. In my internship cover piece, I talk about the style manual as well as other manuals that I worked on during this internship. After my internship was over, I went back and made a style sheet to accompany this style manual.