American Technical Writing Style?

["Cedric Simard" <cedricns -at- hotmail -dot- com>]

MY ISSUE
How much is the writing style important for average American readers/users?

SOME EXPLANATIONS ON THE ISSUE
I am fully aware that each words of the question above would deserve hundred 
of lines - and even pages - of further explanation? Still, I deliberately 
want the question to remain as generic as possible. I will give some more 
details only on two of its aspects:
- Even if my interest mainly goes to technical documentation, I have 
deliberately not specified any "document context" in my question: Feel free 
to anwser with any contexts (B2B documents, public-oriented documents...) 
and any types of documents (technical, marketing...) in mind!
- By "average American readers/users", I simply have in mind people who have 
a true feeling of having an American culture. I know this is a shortcut but 
the matter would be too broad to debate here.

ANSWER ASPECTS
Being asked to define the specificities of the American style of tehnical 
writing, I would at once think of:
- date formats,
- measure units,
- spelling (labor vs. labour),
- "american words"(sidewalk vs. pavement),
- gender-neutral writing (s/he, she/he, his/her vs. their, etc.),
- idiomatisms,
- punctuation and capitalization.

WHAT DO I WANT TO KNOW?
What I would like to know is:
- To what extent are each of the aspects listed above important for American 
readers? You American people, how do you react?
- Are there other aspects not mentioned in the above list that are of 
crucial importance for an American readership?
- When planning for internationalization, is it important to keep two sets 
of documents: one targeted for the American market, and another one target 
for an international audience?
- How does an average American reader react when he reads a technical 
document written in British English? Can this aspect be of prime importance 
for business issues?

Well, I would have loads of questions. You would have understood that I'm 
interested in hearing your opinion, discovering facts and references on this 
matter.
Of course, you would also have understood I'm not American! :-)

Cedric SIMARD
cedricns -at- hotmail -dot- com


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