When you first start working with Acrolinx, you'll receive a guidance package from us. Your guidance package includes standard writing guidance, but customizations are always available if you need them. After we've set up your guidance, you can still change how it works via the Acrolinx Dashboard. You can also change advanced settings in configuration files.
Tip
We regularly update our guidelines to improve the guidance package. This includes editing help texts for more support and guidance. So, no need to panic if you can’t find a guideline! You still get the exact guidance package that you’re used to after an update, but the guideline names might have changed.
Here, you'll find the most important changes and updates to the guidance package. Want to update your guidance package? Get in touch Acrolinx Support to get started.
We used to have two guidelines for missing punctuation at the end of the sentence.
Correctness: Typo perhaps? Is the end punctuation missing?
Consistency: Is the end punctuation missing?
Over time, we made improvements to these guidelines and they ended up highlighting the same issues. That's why we merged these two. We removed the one in Consistency and updated the Correctness one.
You'll now find the guideline "Utiliser la ligature « œ » et « æ »" in the Correction goal. It highlights "oe" and "ae" in words where the characters "œ" and "æ'" should be used instead. Think "œuvre" instead of "oeuvre" and "œufs" instead of "oeufs."
Adjusted the Guideline "These words are normally hyphenated or written together." for English (25 April 2023)
Both the Associated Press Stylebook and the Chicago Manual of Style recommend to not use hyphens if abbreviated units in combination with numerals are used as modifiers.
Previously, the guideline "These words are normally hyphenated or written together." would highlight sentences like "This is a 10 in screen." and suggest 10-in screen.
Acrolinx now only highlights these combinations if the unit is spelled out, for example 10-inch screen.
The default character counts for the existing standard guidelines are now adjustable. For example, you can adjust the counts for the following:
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"Sentence too long" (句子字数过多？) - 50 characters by default
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"Title too long" (标题字数过多？) - 20 characters by default
We’ve added the option “Dynamically check inconsistency” to the "Did you use contractions?" guideline. That way, you don’t have to choose between using contractions or not, but can instead rely on Acrolinx to find any inconsistencies.
We’ve added a new guideline to Einheitlichkeit called “Verwenden Sie Leerzeichen vor Prozentzeichen einheitlich?” Acrolinx now checks the consistency of spacing between numerals and the percent sign.
This guideline already existed for English, but we’ve introduced it for German as well.
We’ve changed some guideline names to match our standards. And to give you better guidance, we’ve also improved the Sidebar and browser help texts.
The following guideline names were updated:
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Rechtschreibung: Dieses Wort Kennen wir nicht > Können Sie das unbekannte Wort prüfen?
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Satzbau: Wort entfernen? > Können Sie das doppelte Wort entfernen?
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Verbform: Verwenden Sie die korrekte Verbform? > Können Sie prüfen, ob die Verbform hier passt?
Filters are now Rechtschreibausnahmen. We found that the naming and descriptions of our default filters didn’t tell you much about their purpose. We’ve changed this. You can now set different Ausnahmen for words or phrases that Acrolinx shouldn’t check. This includes Adressen, Anglizismen, or everything in quotation marks.
We constantly improve our help texts in the Sidebar and browser to provide as much support as possible for your writers. This includes changing older guideline names to fit our standards. After an update, you'll still get the exact guidance package that you’re used to.
With this update, we looked at some German guidelines that come with the goal Korrektheit. Under Rechtschreibung, we've improved the help texts and changed the names to the following:
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Wort kleinschreiben? > Muss das Wort kleingeschrieben werden?
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Wort groß > Muss das Wort großgeschrieben werden?
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Wort zusammenschreiben? > Müssen diese Wörter zusammengeschrieben werden?
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Wort getrennt schreiben? > Muss das Wort getrennt geschrieben werden?
Do you speak Czech? Because Acrolinx does, too. With the new guidance package, you get support for the Czech language in Targets mode. You can now check Czech with the Words and Phrases goal.
Good news for all who check Japanese with Acrolinx! To keep a clear and consistent structure, you can now add Scannability to your Targets.
With 2022.03, we’ve made it possible for you to adjust some Japanese voice guidelines to meet your exact needs. In the Targets section of the Dashboard, you can now select parameters for the following guidelines:
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文を指定字数以下にできますか？
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連続したひらがなを書き換えられますか？
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連続したカタカナを書き換えられますか？
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連続した漢字を書き換えられますか？
For this to work, we’ve changed the name of one guideline to match the functionality. 文を 50 字以下にできますか？is now 文を指定字数以下にできますか？.
("Could you shorten the sentence to 50 characters long or shorter?" is now "Could you shorten the sentence to the specified length or shorter?")
We’ve improved a guideline for Targets and added “Können Sie „der“, „die“ oder „das“ am Anfang von kurzen Aufforderungen vermeiden?” to the standard Clarity guidelines for German. To improve clarity, this guideline prevents you from adding unnecessary articles to short imperative sentences.
We've added functionality to the default guidelines of the guideline group "Acronyms" in Clarity. With these guidelines, Acrolinx checks if the definition of an acronym exists and is introduced correctly. Now, you can choose if the definition should be "strict" (exact match for letters and case) or "relaxed" (case not considered). This option is enabled for English and German.
There’s a new choice for the consistency in character width (全角と半角の統一) guidelines in Japanese. You can now select the option "全角も半角も使用しない" (meaning: don't use full width or half width) for all character-width guidelines.
We’ve decided to standardize some popular English custom guidelines. Custom guidelines are usually added to the guidance package by request only. But some are useful for everyone. That’s why we've included highly requested guidelines for the goals Clarity and Consistency. If you’re using Targets and update your guidance package, some new guidelines might pop up for you to activate.
We’re happy to announce that you can now add the Inclusive Language goal to your Targets in Japanese. This goal covers guidelines for Respectful Language and Accessibility.
With Respectful Language, you can check your content for a wide range of issues involving sexual orientation, gender, disabilities, and offensive expressions. The Accessibility guidelines for Japanese are similar to those for English. Acrolinx looks at certain elements of the content such as links, alt texts, and headers. You’ll also get suggestions to make your content screen reader friendly.
We’ve decided to standardize some popular German custom guidelines. Custom guidelines are usually added to the guidance package by request only. But it looks like some are useful for everyone. We've included highly requested guidelines for the goals Clarity (Verständlichkeit), Consistency (Einheiltlichkeit), and Tone (Ton). If you’re using Targets and update your guidance package, some new guidelines might pop up for you to activate.
For example, aguideline that highlights the so-called “Schachtelsätze”, which are long, complicated sentences with several subordinate clauses, a very well-known issue in German content.
Looking to make your content more accessible to screen reader users? We've expanded our Inclusive Language guidelines to include new guidelines for accessibility.
The guidelines will help you add and optimize alt text, and Acrolinx will let you know if certain aspects of your formatting are unclear. Read more about our accessibility guidelines in the Inclusive Language goal.
Simplified Technical English Issue 8 (27 May 2021)Simplified Technical English Issue 8 (27 May 2021)
We’re happy to announce that we support the newly released Issue 8 of ASD-STE100. You can check ASD-STE Simplified Technical English (STE) Issue 8 if you've enabled Targets or if you still use Guidance Profiles.
In the Targets section, you can now choose Issue 8 and Issue 8 + from your STE presets. Connect with to your Acrolinx contact for a separate Writing Guide if you haven't enabled Targets yet.
Good news! If you're a Cloud customer, Acrolinx now has more sophisticated article and word confusion guidelines for English. You can use these by default in Targets mode only.
The refined guidelines will help your writers with commonly confused words like "affect" or "effect" and "than" or "then". Acrolinx will also let you know if it looks like a sentence is missing an article.
New Consistency Guidelines (16 February 2021)
Acrolinx can now check for stylistic inconsistencies. For example, Acrolinx can identify where you used the serial comma and where you didn't in your content. Acrolinx also finds inconsistencies with things like hyphenation. You'll find these guidelines in our new goal Consistency.