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Okay, let me revise my earlier response. In the example Donn cites, Read
and Write are the proper names of the operations. There are lots of read
operations in the world of computers, but the one I'm referring to right
now has a name, and the name is _Read_.
In the situation Janice and others describe, referring to the name of
something that is downstyled in its native habitat, such as a section
heading, the approach I've taken is to upstyle it in the reference,
again treating it as a proper noun. For example, if a heading is "Theory
of operations," I might say in the text, "... as described in Theory of
Operations, above." This comes up frequently in a different context,
writing about features of a UI. On the UI itself, we like to downstyle
labels. So we might have a label that says, "Project short name"; but we
might have a sentence in a training guide or Help that says, "the
Project Short Name field accepts up to twelve characters." That's a
lousy example, because we would obviously rewrite it to avoid the issue;
but sometimes we do have to refer to things this way.
Anyway, this is one way to approach the situation. Others are equally
valid.
Dick
Donn Le Vie wrote:
For example, a device can read or write bits to a register, but there
are
also Read and Write operations, shortened to something like..."when the
thingamajig performs a Read to the BFD register..."
AND
Janice Gelb wrote:
> I agree that this is bad news for cross-references. Even with
> a "For more information, see" lead-in, not having init caps
> for titles is awkward (and the same for button and menu option
> names, imho).
>
IPCC 01, the IEEE International Professional Communication Conference,
October 24-27, 2001 at historic La Fonda in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA.
CALL FOR PAPERS OPEN UNTIL MARCH 15. http://ieeepcs.org/2001/
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