Welcome to the Splunk Style Guide

The Splunk Style Guide is the writing style reference for Splunk documentation and is intended for anyone who writes or edits customer-facing content. Refer to the Splunk Style Guide when you develop content for Splunk docs or write text for a Splunk product.

The Splunk Style Guide provides usage rules, best practices, punctuation guidelines, text formatting guidance, and more:

• Terms to use and avoid
• Voice and tone of Splunk docs
• The correct way to format links
• The correct way to write about third-party documentation
• Splunk product terminology
• Formatting conventions for Splunk documentation
• Guidelines for writing user interface text

The Splunk Style Guide as a guide

All guidelines in the Splunk Style Guide are exactly that: a guideline. The goal of the Splunk Style Guide is to improve documentation by outlining places where consistency is important across docs, but there are scenarios where it might make sense to move away from these guidelines to make your documentation better. In every scenario, it's most important that you strive for clear, high-quality documentation.

The Splunk Style Guide is a document in motion, so check the Latest changes to the Splunk Style Guide for recent updates.

For style issues that aren't covered in this guide, see Where to look if the Splunk Style Guide doesn't answer your question.

The Splunk Style Guide for the Vale linter tool

To help writers achieve consistent style across Splunk documentation, we created an open-source Vale ruleset that flags for much of the guidance covered in the Splunk Style Guide.

Download the Vale linter at https://vale.sh/ and feel free to pull the latest Splunk Style Guide rules from the repository at https://github.com/splunk/vale-splunk-style-guide.

Questions, comments, or feedback about the Splunk Style Guide

If you have questions, comments, or feedback about the Splunk Style Guide, send us your thoughts using the Was this topic useful? form at the bottom of any page.