The Nomenclature and Style Sheet

Besides the well-known aspects of proofreading—rephrasing, spelling, grammar, punctuation—there is another increasingly important aspect of proofreading in the rapidly changing world of technological progress in industry and life generally. The newer the project or company, the more rapidly terminology will change. I have been brought into many projects in order to rewrite, proofread, and clean up materials which have been developed over a period of evolutionary development in the minds of multiple creators. As an outside consultant, I am often left asking, "You seem to be using x, y, and z interchangeably to refer to a product, idea, or job. Are these synonymous terms, or am I missing something?" —And that is before we deal with the problems of acronyms and jargon.

To minimize confusion and maximize comprehension in your reader, viewer, or participant, it is critical to standardize your terminology. Put together a list of your most poetic terms for your most important ideas, products, services, etc.—along with a short form or acronym for each. Make sure that in each situation in which a reader, viewer, or participant is first introduced to one of these terms that you use the long form and tie it to its short form or acronym, i.e. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

This list is often called a nomenclature and style guide. Besides the list of terms, you will need to set rules for capitalization. In some situations a term may be part of a title of a specific set of instructions associated with a process—as in Customer Experience. References to this set of instructions might also be capitalized as Customer Experience; whereas, other references to general customer experiences would remain in lower case.

Similarly, on big projects every aspect of appearance should be standardized across all media. That includes everything from fonts, colors, spacing, to punctuation. As a professional proofreader it is often my job to point out all of the incongruous usages scattered across various media.

Then there is the question of jargon. Besides familiar word meanings and definitions found in dictionaries, you will also notice that people working together in industry-wide groups—or even just within a particular company—have developed their own special jargon or vocabulary. For example in a technical book on designing industrial networking for tools and robots, the author kept using the word "to architect" where I would have used "to design." If you look up "architect" at merriam-webster.com you will not find the word listed as a verb, but in this industrial niche "to architect" is a verb for designing a factory floor network. In the quickly advancing world of science and industry, new vocabulary is constantly being created and added to "the book!"

All of the above situations will require a good deal of correspondence between the proofreader and the creators to unify the entire array of materials and clear up ambiguities.