Top 10 Tips Microsoft Style Guide

• Use bigger ideas, fewer words
  • Our modern design hinges on crisp minimalism. Shorter is always better.
• Write like you speak
  • Read your text aloud. Does it sound like something a real person would say? Be friendly and conversational. No. Robot. Words.
• Project friendliness
  • Use contractions: it’s, you’ll, you’re, we’re, let’s.
• Get to the point fast
  • Lead with what’s most important. Front-load keywords for scanning. Make customer choices and next steps obvious.
• Be brief
  • Give customers just enough information to make decisions confidently. Prune every excess word.
• When in doubt, don’t capitalize
  • Default to sentence-style capitalization—capitalize only the first word of a heading or phrase and any proper nouns or names. Never Use Title Capitalization (Like This). Never Ever.
• Skip periods (and : ! ?)
  • Skip end punctuation on titles, headings, subheads, UI titles, and items in a list that are three or fewer words. Save the periods for paragraphs and body copy.
• Remember the last comma
  • In a list of three or more items, include a comma before the conjunction. (The comma that comes before the conjunction is known as the Oxford or serial comma.)
• Don’t be spacey
  • Use only one space after periods, question marks, and colons—and no spaces around dashes.
• Revise weak writing
  • Most of the time, start each statement with a verb. Edit out you can and there is, there are, there were.