We’ve waited 18 years, but now a new authoritative style manual has come. If you don’t mind us blowing our own trumpet, Ethos CRS is pretty pleased to have researched and written content as lead authors.

The Australian Government Style Manual was published by the Digital Transformation Agency as a digital version on 24 September 2020.

It’s authoritative, it’s universally available and it’s free.

It’s the essential resource for professionals who want to write clearly and it caters for a generation that reads and writes almost exclusively online.

This style manual focuses on the needs of people with disability – a group that too often is left behind when it comes to text.

For this digital version, accessibility was uppermost in mind of researchers, writers and designers. The principle that text and content must be clear and accessible drove the changes that we made to some well-established style conventions.

So, what’s new and different?

Well, Australian Government style emphasises the needs of readers not writers and editors. So to list but a few things:

• The focus is on clear English that is accessible as a default. From here on writers have no reason to adopt a numbing bureaucratic style.
• The convention for how we treat numbers is different.
• The em–dash is gone.
• We use commas in numbers with 4 or more digits: 1,000 rather than 1 000.

The challenge now for organisations is to incorporate these compelling conventions into their own practice.