Splunk® Style Guide

Splunk Style Guide

The guidelines in the Splunk Style Guide establish best practices for writing technical documentation. Search docs.splunk.com to find documentation related to Splunk products.

Definition lists

When you write Splunk documentation, use a definition list to define a set of terms, descriptions, explanations, or associations.

Qualities of definition lists

Definition lists must have the following qualities:

  • A complete lead-in sentence
  • More than 1 defined term
  • 2 levels: the term, which is in bold and on its own line, and the definition, which is at least 1 full sentence indented on its own line
  • Parallel sentence construction
  • Sentence case capitalizationn
  • 1 idea for each list
  • End punctuation for every definition line

You can add a paragraph break after each definition if the formatting is tight. If you need to use multiple definition lists or organize more content, you might find that a table works better for this purpose. See Best practices for including tables.

For more guidance on using lists, see Best practices for writing with lists.

Example

The following example of a definition list contains a complete lead-in sentence. Each item in the list uses parallel construction and complete sentences.

You can run the following types of searches with the Splunk platform:

Raw event search
A raw event search retrieves events from an index and is typically used to analyze a problem, such as checking error codes, correlating events, investigating security issues, and analyzing failures.
Transforming search
A transforming search performs a statistical calculation against a set of results. For example, you can get a daily count of error events, count the login attempts from a user, or calculate the 95th percentile of field values.
Last modified on 28 November, 2023
Numbered lists   Best practices for using callout boxes

This documentation applies to the following versions of Splunk® Style Guide: current

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