Abstract

Among many technical writing handbooks the terms “Style” and “Format” have been broadly used when instructed to write clear and comprehensive documents. These terms may not have been definite terms; rather, the use of these terms depends on how they are understood by technical writers and writers in general.
The purpose of this paper is: 1) to study how “Style” and “Format” are defined in technical writing or writing handbooks, and find out how they are used; and 2) to revise the documents in terms of what “Style” in Williams (2000) suggested. The results show that the terms “Style” and “Format” are loosely defined, but the following trends are found: “Style” is used in terms of word and sentence-level-the meaning of the words and sentences; and “Format” is used in terms of documents-level-the layout or appearances in a document. As well, Williams's (2000) definitions of “Style” provide us with useful insights when writing not only technical documents, but writing documents for the audiences' points of view.