About/ of?

Subject: About/ of?
From: "Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2001 08:46:33 -0400

Swati Jain wonders about <<Personal Details allow to record and maintain the
complete personal information of the employees.>>

"Allows to" is almost always a longer way of saying "lets", and that's a
good first effort if you don't want to rewrite extensively. My main problem
with the sentence is that it conceals the actor: allows (or lets) who? If
this is a field in a dialog box, or a program, it's much simpler to make the
sentence active: "Personal Details records and maintains complete personal
information about employees." You could probably also get rid of "complete",
because (a) it's unlikely to be true and (b) it's unnecessary, since context
before or after this sentence will explain which details are recorded and
maintained. Similarly, if you're using "maintained" to indicate "are kept
until you get rid of them", delete it; "record" already says that. If by
"maintains" you mean that it lets you manage, update, etc. the information,
then keep it.

--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
"User's advocate" online monthly at
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