The Australian manual of style (AMOS) (stylemanual.com.au) is a ‘practical guide to help you produce clear, accurate, engaging content’. In other words, it is a style guide to help you with grammar, formatting, document structure, presenting data, designing graphs, writing about science, doing user research, and many other aspects of writing, editing and layout.
It has 6 main sections:
- Engaging — who are you writing for, how can you best reach them?
- Writing — how to structure your content, decide what is in and what is out, and write it effectively.
- Editing — how to refine your work, present it consistently, reference it properly, and so on.
- Showing — how to present information using graphics, diagrams and infographics, and incorporate them into the text.
- Subject areas — tricks and conventions specific to various fields and subjects.
- Resources — quick guides (these are really handy), terms to watch out for, and some other useful information.
Until the end of 2023, AMOS was a subscription-based product, but now it is free and open. Take a look!
It has considerable breadth. It covers the core of English but also gives specifics like how to present chemical equations and mathematics, when to italicise species names, what the current conventions are for presenting graphs, and so on.
DSPACE 