Warning
Acrolinx has started to phase out support for the Guidance section of the dashboard. But don’t worry! We've replaced it with Targets. If you have Targets enabled, you already have an easier way to manage your guidance. In Targets, Simplified Technical English (STE) is one of the languages you can select when you create a Target. Learn more in Simplified Technical English (ASD-STE100).
You might also want to look at our Sunset Policy.
When you first start working with Acrolinx, you'll receive a guidance package from our linguists. Your guidance package contains customized writing guidance according to the requirements of your organization, including your company-specific style guidelines and terminology. If you need, you'll also get Simplified Technical English (STE) with your guidance package. We support version 6 and version 7 (January 2017) of the STE specification.Acrolinx adheres to the strict STE dictionary. This is to make sure that writers know when they've used a word that's not in the dictionary. We recommend adding your company-specificnames and verbs to your terminology database. That way, your writers can use both your company terminology and the STE dictionary.
We support most rules in the STE specification. Use the following tables to see which rules we support. Keep in mind that the number of rules changed with version 7. That's why each version has a separate table.
|
Section |
Section Supported Rules |
Unsupported Rules **** |
|---|---|---|
|
Section 1: Words |
1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, 1.7, 1.10*, 1.11, 1.12, 1.13, 1.14, 1.15, 1.16, 1.17 |
1.8, 1.9, 1.12, 1.15, 1.17 |
|
Section 2: Noun Phrases |
2.1, 2.3 |
2.2 |
|
Section 3: Verbs |
3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 3.7 |
3.8 |
|
Section 4: Sentences |
4.2**, 4.3 |
4.1, 4.4 |
|
Section 5: Procedures |
5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 5.5 |
|
|
Section 6: Descriptive writing |
6.1, 6.7 |
6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 6.5, 6.6, 6.8 |
|
Section 7: Warnings, cautions, notes |
7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, 7.5, 7.6 |
|
|
Section 8: Punctuation and word counts |
8.1***, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4, 8.5, 8.6, 8.7, 8.9, 8.10, 8.11 |
8.8 |
|
Section 9: Writing practices |
9.1, 9.2, 9.3 |
|
|
Section 9: Writing practices |
9.1, 9.2, 9.3 |
|
|
We only partially support rules that are marked with an asterisk. * We support this rule as part of the "use approved words" rule, but we don’t actively classify words as slang or jargon. ** There are many possibilities where words could be added in a sentence. We only partially support this rule because it’s currently not possible to reliably identify all these instances in Acrolinx. *** We support the use of vertical lists via rule 4.3, but we don’t specifically enforce the use of ":" and "-" as specified by rule 8.1. |
**** It’s currently not possible to implement and check them in Acrolinx. |
|
Section |
Supported Rules |
Unsupported Rules**** |
|---|---|---|
|
Section 1: Words |
1.1, 1.2, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, 1.7, 1.11*, 1.12, 1.13, 1.14 |
1.3, 1.8, 1.9, 1.10, 1.11 |
|
Section 2: Noun clusters |
2.1, 2.2, 2.3 |
|
|
Section 3: Verbs |
3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6 |
3.7 |
|
Section 4: Sentences |
4.2**, 4.3 |
4.1, 4.4 |
|
Section 5: Procedural writing |
5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4 |
5.5 |
|
Section 6: Descriptive writing |
6.3, 6.6 |
6.1, 6.2, 6.4, 6.5 |
|
Section 7: Safety instructions |
7.1, 7.2, 7.3 |
|
|
Section 8: Punctuation and word counts |
8.1, 8.2, 8.4***, 8.5, 8.6, 8.7 |
8.3 |
|
Section 9: Writing practices |
9.1, 9.2, 9.3, 9.4 |
|
|
We only partially support rules that are marked with an asterisk. * We support this rule as part of the "use approved words" rule, but we don’t actively classify words as slang or jargon. ** There are many possibilities where words could be added in a sentence. We only partially support this rule because it’s currently not possible to reliably identify all these instances in Acrolinx. *** We support the use of vertical lists, but we don’t specifically enforce the use of ":" and "-" as specified by rule 8.4. |
**** It’s currently not possible to implement and check them in Acrolinx. |
Our documentation tells you how our standard Acrolinx Score is calculated. You might wonder if we calculate the Acrolinx Score differently for STE.
The Acrolinx Score for STE is calculated in exactly the same way but with one difference: Acrolinx uses the STE rules for counting words instead of the standard Acrolinx method. The STE rules will generally cause Acrolinx to count fewer words than the standard word counting methods, for example counting placard titles or quotes as one word.
Generally we support STE with every Acrolinx Integration. However, not all Integrations are yet optimized for STE checking.Some rules only work when you check XML documents, such as rule 6.7 "paragraph length" and rule 8.10 "titles, placards, and quoted text count as one word". Checking STE with Acrolinx works best in a supported XML editor.
You can see the supported authoring tools in the Compatibility Guide.
STE is sometimes a requirement for S1000D documents in English. S1000D also has many other standards like a certain XML document structure. We can provide context-specific style guidelines for this structure. These guidelines help your writers to ensure that their content matches the structure requirements. Apart from that, we've implemented S1000D units and measurements. It's also possible to get extraction settings in a Content Profile for S1000D. These extraction settings will ensure that Acrolinx interprets this structure correctly during a check.