There is a lot of confusion about the difference between style and grammar when it comes to writing. Many people think that they are the same thing, but they are not. As a writer working with internal development and operations teams, I am often asked whether the wiki content that team members have produced is “right”. The team members want to make sure that their content is grammatically correct. More often than not, however, the questions from team members are ones of style and not grammar. So, what is the difference?

Writing Style

Writing style defines the way a writer uses words. It includes things such as the tone, voice, and word choice that are used in their writing. Companies often choose a style guide or creates their own style for their writers to use. The style guide provides a set of conventions that dictate how a piece of writing should sound and look, including the way words are formatted on the page. A style guide might provide conventions on what words and formatting to use when providing user instructions in a software program interface. For example, do writers use bold to format the names of fields and buttons? What words do they use to describe actions in a user interface? “Check” a checkbox but “choose” a radio button? By using a style guide, teams can ensure that they produce consistent, high-quality documentation.

Some common style guides for technical writers include the Microsoft Manual of Style and the Chicago Manual of Style. Journalists are more likely to use the Associated Press (AP) Stylebook, and academics often use the Modern Language Association (MLA) or American Psychological Association (APA) style.

Grammar

Grammar, unlike style, is the structure of a language. It includes the rules about how words can be combined to form sentences, and how those sentences should be punctuated. You might have enjoyed learning some of your grammar rules from the Schoolhouse Rock series that used to play during Saturday morning cartoons and that are still available today on DVD. If you watched the shows, you learned facts about parts of speech and how to use them. For instance:

Interjections (Hey!) show excitement (Yow!) or emotion (Ouch!)
They’re generally set apart from a sentence by an exclamation point,
Or by a comma when the feeling’s not as strong.

These shows were certainly part of my history, and I made sure that my kids learned from them.

Most of the information in the Schoolhouse Rock grammar shows is still true today, but grammar rules do change over time. Language is constantly evolving, and grammar rules change to reflect how people actually speak and write. For example, the use of “they” as a singular pronoun was once considered incorrect, but it is now widely accepted as standard. The word “google” is now in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as a transitive verb meaning “to use the Google search engine to obtain information about (someone or something) on the World Wide Web.”

So, whether information is “right”, meaning grammatically correct, you have to consider current practices.

Conclusion

Both writing style and grammar are important. To some extent, both represent common practices within our society. However, style defines elements such as preferred work choice, formatting, and tone. Grammar defines language structure and how combine and punctuate words.