Microsoft® Manual of Style, Fourth Edition

Global English syntax

For the most part, syntax that is good for a worldwide audience is also good for native English speakers. The following guidelines are helpful to all users of technical content, but they are especially helpful to non-native English speakers.

Note

If you know beforehand that machine translation will be used to translate your content, also use Machine translation syntax. Doing so will significantly improve the quality of machine-translated content.

Guideline	More information
Avoid long, convoluted sentences.	Even if they are well written, they are hard for non-native English speakers to understand. Long sentences may also cause difficulty for localizers.
Use lists and tables instead of complicated sentence and paragraph structures. ...