A comprehensive style guide is essential to good data

Until now, it's been impossible to quantify the effect of clarifying and expanding the rules in a style guide. But we've just finished a project that shows even a good style guide's quality can be improved by almost 2x.

We ran a large dataset containing more than 25,000 real resource database service records with a good Style Guide, through our Style Guide Curator. The result was that 61% of the records perfectly adhered to its rules for all field types.

We then synthesized a much more comprehensive Style Guide, incorporating far-ranging rules and guidelines only seen infrequently across the wide range of them in use by I&R agencies today. Together they contained much more prescriptive guidance for the best practices of written resource records.

Then we ran the same 25,000 real resource database service records through our Style Guide Curator, and only 32% of them perfectly adhered to its rules. In other words, the new Style Guide found twice as many legitimate issues with the same data, as the original Style Guide. Which means there's a significantly higher amount of data improvement than first believed.

I've been promoting the importance of Style Guides, and I've already read more this year (at least 40) than I did for my entire tenure building a major I&R software platform.

So I strongly encourage you to take a closer look at your own Style Guide to expand and clarify its rules. And if you'd like assistance from us, we would happily do a project with you like the one we recently completed for Inform Florida.