General Style Guide Best Practice for Navigation

[smajors]

Hello,

I'm trying to find a style guide or advice about best practices for describing navigation in technical documentation. My team's style is to use arrows, for example, "To locate the user manual, go to: www.abcxyz.com > Click Login > Click Employee > Click the Training Resources drop-down list > Select User Manual."

However, another department in my workplace uses double arrows >> but that hasn't been our standard and I'd rather give them a good reason as to why we use one arrow (is that common practice in tech comm?) rather than stating it's just the style we use.

So far, I've looked in the Microsoft Manual of Style, Chicago Manual of Style, and have searched Google but am not finding a solid reason or documentation of this anywhere.

Thanks for any tips you have. Sorry if this post does not belong here; admin, feel free to delete.

[Nita Beck]

Your question is a fine one!

Just looking at two industry standards, both the Apple Style Guide and the Microsoft Manual of Style show examples of menu commands with the single angle bracket.

From Apple:
-- "Choose File > Print, and then enter the number of copies."
-- "Choose Tools > Annotation > Rectangle, and then drag to create a rectangle."

From Microsoft, in the section titled "Right angle brackets for menu items" (with bolding in the original):
-- To sort the email in a folder other than your inbox, tap Menu > Go To > Folders, and then click the folder you want to use.

These two industry standards would be enough for me to adopt the single angle bracket convention.

HTH

[smajors]

Nita,

Thank you! This information is exactly what I was looking for.