Microsoft style and voice This chapter highlights the shift toward a lighter, friendlier tone in Microsoft content, with succinct guidelines for writing in the Microsoft voice.

Content for the web This chapter can help you decide which type of web content best suits your intended audience. It offers guidance for the creation of effective text, video, and audio for the web and includes information about optimizing your content—including blogs and wikis—for readability, search engines, and social media.

Content for a worldwide audience This chapter reflects the pervasive internationalization of information in the software industry. The Microsoft Manual of Style now includes substantial information about writing for a global audience. “International considerations” sections throughout the manual call attention to issues of localization, global English, and machine translation.

Accessible content This chapter includes the latest guidance on accessibility for content, and how to describe accessibility features in software and hardware products and services. “Accessibility considerations” sections throughout the manual call attention to these concerns.

The user interface (UI) This chapter includes content for the NUI and Windows Phone UI, and features illustrations of touch and gesture guidelines. To help you write about the user interface in new ways, there are guidelines for writing content for multiple platforms and a checklist for creating UI text, and more.

Procedures and technical content This chapter includes topics on document conventions, cloud computing style, and other general technical issues. It also includes new guidance about reference documentation and code examples for software developers, making the manual a more relevant resource for all content that is created for this audience—from websites, to Help, to software development kits (SDKs).

Practical issues of style This chapter provides page layout guidelines and guidance for common style problems such as how to format titles and headings, lists, and numbers.

Acronyms and abbreviations This list contains acronyms and abbreviations that are commonly used in the software industry and a table of abbreviations of measurements.

Grammar, Punctuation, Indexes and keywords These chapters cover grammar and punctuation guidelines relevant to Microsoft style and provide resources for indexing content.

The usage dictionary This section includes individual guidance for more than 1,000 technical terms.