accordastyle

Accordastyle is a comprehensive editorial standard intended to unify writing and formatting across technical documentation and scholarly work. It covers grammar, punctuation, capitalization, typography, and citations, with an emphasis on clarity, precision, and accessibility. The guide promotes a controlled vocabulary to ensure consistent terminology and favors concise prose with a preference for active voice in instructional material; passive constructions are allowed in certain contexts.

Origin and scope: Accordastyle arose from collaborative efforts among editors and educators to improve cross-disciplinary communication. It is designed to be language-agnostic, though current resources primarily address English and are adaptable to other languages through localized vocabularies.

Key guidelines: Use digits for numbers ten and above; SI units with a space between number and unit; spell out first use of abbreviations and standardize thereafter; use the serial comma to reduce ambiguity; dates in year-month-day order; headings in sentence case; consistent capitalization and hyphenation; plain language and consistent terminology.

Citations and references: Supports multiple schemes (author–year or numeric) with a single bibliographic template and cross-referencing for verification.

Code and data: Inline code in monospaced font; code blocks clearly distinguished; variables written in lowercase with underscores; data tables accessible; URLs treated as links with descriptive text.

Accessibility: Includes WCAG-aligned recommendations for contrast, alt text, and keyboard navigation.

Adoption: Used by several universities and software teams seeking cross-project consistency.

See also: Chicago, APA, MLA, IEEE, ACM Styles.

References: Accordastyle guidelines (online).