Style Manual of the Government Printing Office
The pattern
This still is filed under Specimen as proof.
Define
A specimen (type, material, finish) is shown so the product proves itself under comparison.
Mechanism
Controlled display. Same conditions, side by side, no adjective required. The sample is the sentence.
Verdict
Buyers choose by eye or by hand and we can put the real thing in front of them.
Why it works
The manual front-loads jurisdiction rather than instruction: before a single rule appears the reader has seen a statute, a committee approval and a government-wide adopting resolution, so every later rule arrives pre-argued. The body is organized for lookup, not reading, with a bold catchword as the entry point and an exhaustive front Style Summary that indexes the whole book by topic, which is why a rulebook this dense survived a century of revisions. Rules are taught by showing the correct setting with its type spec called out in the margin, so the standard and the production instruction travel together and cannot be separated by a compositor in a hurry. The compound-word list at the back is the tell: the manual settles the arguments that would otherwise be relitigated on every job, by enumerating them.
Steal this when
Copy this when a standard has to hold across teams that do not report to each other. Open with the authority that makes it binding, organize the body strictly for lookup with a bold term as the entry point, show the correct output rather than describing it, and end with an exhaustive list that pre-settles the recurring edge cases.