"Targets" now called "style guides"
To make the language in Acrolinx a little more intuitive, we've renamed Targets to style guides. The feature itself will still work as expected.
Welcome to our quick start on style guides. Here you'll learn:
Notice
You can view the style guides section with the View style guides privilege. To make changes, you need to have the privilege Edit style guides. Learn more in User Privileges.
In short: In the style guides section of the Dashboard you decide what Acrolinx checks and which issues show up in the Acrolinx Sidebar.
You create a style guide to tell Acrolinx what type of guidance you want for a particular type of content. A style guide determines the type of guidance that writers receive from the Sidebar. You define your style guide depending on your audience or content type.
A style guide consists of one or more goals. A goal is an aspect of language that you want Acrolinx to focus on. Each goal is made up of guidelines. A guideline relates to a specific piece of guidance that Acrolinx provides (for example, “Is this word spelled correctly?”).
Notice
To make guidelines easier to find, Acrolinx organizes them into broader groups (for example, “Spelling” and “Sentence Structure”). You can decide which goals you want to include in your style guide and if they count toward the Acrolinx Score.
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Goal name (Click for more information) |
Checks for... |
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Spelling and grammar |
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Readability |
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Tone of voice |
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Inconsistencies |
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Clear structure |
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Your terminology |
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Aspects of inclusiveness |
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Preferred expressions from Reuse |
Example: Let’s say you manage blog posts and technical documentation. Those two types of content would need different types of guidance. You would create a style guide for blog posts (maybe with a focus on tone) and a separate style guide for technical documentation (maybe with a focus on consistency).
To check content with Acrolinx, you need a style guide. Decide which goals to include and start creating.
To add a style guide, follow these steps:
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Click ADD STYLE GUIDE to open the slide-out dialog.
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Choose a unique name for your style guide, and select the language you’re creating the style guide for. You might also add a description.
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Select your goals from the list that appears in the slide out. You'll see this after you select a language. Your style guide needs at least one goal.
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Click ADD.
Tip
You’ll see your existing style guides in a list on the Style guides page. You can always add or remove goals with the Edit style guide option. To open a style guide, click on the style guide name and click Edit style guide on the top left. Read on in Create and Edit Style Guides.
After you've created a style guide, you might want to make sure that it's set up according to your needs.
Each goal comes with some presets. These presets help you set up the type of guidance you want from a goal so you don’t have to adjust all the guidelines yourself. You can use the presets that meet your needs — such as choosing a “conversational” tone — or create custom presets.
Select a preset
Acrolinx provides presets that are suitable for a lot of content needs. The presets make it easy to pick the type of guidance you’d like so you don’t have to adjust each individual guideline. You can choose the preset that fits best for each goal.
Presets work out of the box so you can adjust your goals without focusing on specific guidelines. In Clarity, for example, you decide if your content should be simple or more complex.
To select a preset, follow these steps:
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In the list of style guides, click the name of the style guide you'd like to edit.
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Click on a goal to expand it.
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Select a preset from the dropdown next to the Goal name.
You can also create custom presets. See Fine-tune your Goals to learn more.
Tip
Goals are Required by default. You can also set a goal to Recommended. If you do this, Acrolinx will show guidance for a goal, but it won’t count toward your score. Learn more in The Acrolinx Score Explained.
Now, that you’ve created a style guide, you need to make sure that the right writers are using it. You'll see the number of style guides that need an assignment in the red notification in the upper right corner of the Manage Assignments button.
To assign a style guide to your writers, follow these steps:
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Click MANAGE ASSIGNMENTS to open the slide-out menu.
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You’ll find unassigned style guides at the bottom of the list. Click on the arrow to expand the list.
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You can either assign the style guide to all writers, or select which content contributors should check with the style guide.
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To assign the style guide to all users, click the plus group icon
Assign to all.
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To select specific writers, click the pen icon
Edit. You can select users based on the following criteria:
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Acrolinx role. To select roles, click the check boxes in the list view.
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Custom user information that is set to mandatory. To select custom user information, click the check boxes in the list view.
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Usernames. You can search for usernames in the search field or click the check boxes in the list view.
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Click SAVE. For more information on criteria selection and assignment management, read on in Assign Style Guides.
Here's an example of options that you have when you don't want to Assign to all. In this case, Department is the custom user information field.
Tip
If you need ASD-STE100 for your content, simply create a style guide for it. See STE - Simplified Technical English.