Introduction

This style guide addresses editorial decisions specific to developer documentation: how we write API references, guides, tutorials, and the developer-facing text around them. It records the decisions we’ve made so you don’t have to relitigate them — and so the docs read as one voice no matter who wrote them.

Precedence and fallback

When style guidance conflicts, apply it in this order:

1. Project-specific style. A product or project may document deliberate exceptions; those win within that project.
2. This guide. The rules here override any external reference where they conflict.
3. The Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition or current) for general English style this guide doesn’t address — grammar, punctuation, typography, capitalization of common forms, citation style. Chicago is the authoritative external reference; on questions this guide is silent about, Chicago is the authority.
4. Merriam-Webster for spelling and hyphenation of words the word list doesn’t cover.

For contested points where Chicago is silent or unsuited to developer documentation, Google’s developer documentation style guide is a useful tiebreaker, but it does not override anything above.