Most people have different styles of writing for different departments. In Acrolinx, your style guides are in the form of writing guides or Targets. When you want to fine-tune your guidelines, you'll start by selecting a writing guide or Target.
In the second step of the guidance wizard, click Fine-tune the guidelines in "<Name>".
Once you open the guidelines page for your selected writing guide, you'll see a list of the guidelines that create the most issues for your writers. You can then decide what to do with each guideline.
The guidance wizard doesn't suggest what to do with each guideline. Instead, it sorts your list of guidelines based on how often they've created issues for your writers. In the "Actions" column, you'll see the action that's currently configured for each guideline.
Tip
If you've just installed Acrolinx, the selected actions are the system defaults. Otherwise, these actions are based on selections that you made the last time you used the guidance wizard or guideline configuration page.
To fine-tune your guidelines, follow these steps:
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Review the current action for each guideline, look at the usage examples, and if necessary, update the guidelines that need a different action.
You can do the following for each guideline:
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Turn off the guideline completely. -
Turn on the guideline.
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Make this guideline apply only to certain contexts within your document structure. Guidelines that relate to the length of a sentence or paragraph have one extra option:
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Change the word or sentence limit that's defined in the guideline.
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If you want to change the limit for a guideline that controls the sentence or paragraph length, click the configure button
In the window that appears, you can enter the new limit. To help you with your decision, Acrolinx provides statistics on the distribution of sentence or paragraph lengths in your content.
The vertical axis shows the number of occurrences and the horizontal access shows the different sentence lengths that Acrolinx detected.
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If you're not sure about a guideline, try looking at examples of where the guideline caused an issue.
There are two ways to do this:
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To see one usage example, move your mouse over the guideline. In the help section, you'll see one example sentence where Acrolinx found the word.
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To see all sentences where the guideline caused an issue, click the guideline.
In the usage examples window that appears, you can review all the ways in which your writers broke the guideline.
In many cases, the issues might be due to other Acrolinx settings such as filter and extraction settings. You can then go back to the writers and help them with these settings.
Note
What do the little gray and blue tags mean?
These tags indicate where Acrolinx found the sentence in the document structure.
The gray tags represent the actual elements of the document. For example, in an HTML document, your sentence might be in
p > table > p. The blue tags are extra tags added by Acrolinx. Acrolinx uses these extra tags to categorize different contexts. This is important for context-sensitive guidelines, like those with different guidelines for how long a sentence should be. Sentences in titles should generally be much shorter than sentences in paragraphs. Context-sensitive guidelines kick in when a context tag matches the tag that's defined in the guideline.
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Click Apply Changes to save your changes.
If you haven't changed anything, click Back to return to the overview page.