For some years now, our technical writers at Google have used an internal-only editorial style guide for most of our developer documentation. In order to better support external contributors to our open source projects, such as Kubernetes, AMP, or Dart, and to allow for more consistency across developer documentation, we’re now making that style guide public.
Hartman further says, “If you contribute documentation to projects like those, you now have direct access to useful guidance about voice, tone, word choice, and other style considerations. It can be useful for general issues, like reminders to use second person, present tense, active voice, and the serial comma; it can also be great for checking very specific issues, like whether to write ‘app’ or ‘application’ when you want to be consistent with the Google Developers style.”
If you are working on a project that needs documentation, and you want to follow Google’s style guide, you can simply access it here. Keep in mind that you don’t have to follow it verbatim — you can internally alter it to your heart’s content and make it work best for your project.
