You can now use our developer-documentation style guide for open source documentation projects.

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.

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.

The style guide is a reference document, so instead of reading through it in linear order, you can use it to look things up as needed. For matters of punctuation, grammar, and formatting, you can do a search-in-page to find items like "Commas," "Lists," and "Link text" in the left nav. For specific terms and phrases, you can look at the word list.

Keep an eye on the guide's release notes page for updates and developments, and send us your comments and suggestions via the Send Feedback link on each page of the guide—we want to hear from you as we continue to evolve the style guide.