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As it turns out, another style guide lays down a frame uniquely relevant for analyzing the language of Word grammar checker: the Microsoft Manual of Style. Now in its fourth edition, which appeared in 2012, this book is available in paperback and in one electronic format (Kindle), and it began like most style guides, as an in-house document to guide

Microsoft employees on appropriate choices in their writing. The current Manual significantly revises the previous version, published in 2004 and called the Microsoft Manual of Style for

Technical Publications, then in a third edition. (That version came with an accompanying PDF

version on CD, as the current edition does not.) Though the 2012 revision incorporates significant updates, the overall structure and much of the content of the fourth edition are the same as the third, so it is worth noting that, historically, the Manual’s core audience, unlike style guides that were developed for academic organizations (MLA), social science researchers (APA), publishers (Chicago), or journalists (AP) has been and remains technical writers, even if its guidance transfers well to other contexts, especially business and professional writing situations.

The language of Word’s user interface and documentation are prime examples of

Thomas and Turner’s “practical” prose, written to help the user to do a job: in this case, the task of checking Word documents for what the programmers consider error. Microsoft is the

corporate author of the Manual, as well as of the grammar checker’s code and all its documentation. This guide can thus provide a window into the thinking that guides and constrains Microsoft employees in their writing of such utterances as the menu of the grammar and style checker or the explanations that appear on its online “Help” page.

Half of this 438-page book is a tabbed, alphabetized reference, the “Usage Dictionary,” where one can find directions on appropriate usage as well as some definitions of technical terms. Much of the content in the chapters that precede the alphabetized guide also treats usage and punctuation conventions, the kind of “surface features” that Thomas and Turner describe as incidental compared to the foundational decisions about stance that decide a style. Still,

statements and implications about Microsoft stance – explanations about the rationale behind these surface-feature choices – are interwoven in directions throughout the guide. And, most pertinently for our purposes in this chapter, of analyzing the register, the book opens its first chapter, “Microsoft Style and Voice,” with explicit treatment of questions of stance, especially in its first section, “Principles of Microsoft style.” Its direct statements allow us to compare

Microsoft style’s stance – the set of assumptions underlying any performance of the Microsoft corporate voice in writing – to Thomas and Turner’s description of the stances in “classic” and “practical” styles.

In the vocabulary of “style” versus “register” established in this dissertation chapter, Microsoft style functions as a register rather than as a personal style, but it lies in a curious middle ground. According to Microsoft’s most recent annual report, the company employs 111,000 people (Microsoft, “Business”). As a set of language conventions adopted, encoded, and enforced by editors at one of the largest corporations in the world, Microsoft style functions as a specific variant of a meta-register we could call “corporate style,” itself a type of practical style, in turn a sub-register of plain style. Also, the apparent success of the guide (in its multiple editions) indicates that it fills a need for an encoded standard of writing that

encompasses both business writing and technical documentation, in the digital age, beyond the Microsoft corporation. (Without published sales data on books, Amazon sales rankings offer a rough proxy of the book’s success, where it sells well against a handful of similar published guides such as those from Yahoo! and IBM.) If the conventions encoded in the guide represent expectations that are the standard for many writers, across genre types, then its prescriptions can be accurately said to describe a broad register.

At the same time, however, the early chapters in the Manual emphasize that there is a Microsoft style and voice – one voice – and it is the task of any Microsoft employee to adopt and perform that style, to speak in that voice, blending, folding, disappearing into it. It is one voice, singular, to which the corporate and unnamed author of the book (presumably, many authors speaking as one writer) refers repeatedly: “a consistent and friendly voice,” a “recognizable” voice (3). Examples of “Not Microsoft style” include “You must register with Microsoft to receive free technical support,” considered too dictatorial; “Microsoft style” would be “Your technical support is available when you register with Microsoft” (4), a cheerful offer. While the writers avail themselves of the royal we, referring apparently to Microsoft employees, they nevertheless state without irony that this performance of one “unified voice” is “critical for creating a relationship of trust and engagement with our users,” the legions of Microsoft customers who are users of the company’s software, hardware, and services.

The illusion of a business corporation as one corpus, one body, one person with one voice, carries a cascade of further implications that such a stance implies. Its ethical, legal, and rhetorical implications are well beyond the scope of this research and would constitute a worthy extension of it, into the question of corporate language analyzed through the lens of prescribed register versus personal style, especially as informed by Deborah Brandt’s

scholarship on corporate ghostwriting (“When People Write for Pay”). For my purposes in this dissertation, “Microsoft style” functions as a register – a set of encoded conventions that

proscribe individuals’ writing choices, whether because they like the guidance offered in the Microsoft guide and voluntarily apply it to their writing or because they work for a company that uses this Manual and are required to follow its house style.

It is worthwhile to stay curious about who the ghostwriters are – both the programmers and the writers of the documentation – and how their worldview drives their writing style and their choices of what “grammar rules” to include in the checker’s checking functions.

Furthermore, while some use the word “style” is unavoidable, given that my sources, including the Microsoft Manual as well as Thomas and Turner, Strunk and White, and Williams and Colomb, use “style” not “register” to name the typified linguistic styles they are describing and prescribing, it is important to note that I consider these “styles” to be registers, because of that typification.