spell it out a second time within 4 pages, or cross-ref?

["Genevieve Roberts" <gen -at- qrtz -dot- com>]

Bear with me, please, as I try to explain a problem of repetitions, because
the explanation is repetitious.

I have a number of dialog boxes to explain that have the same search
criteria.

For example:

In the Select Job dialog box, the user can search on Active & Pending Jobs
or Done Jobs.

This dialog box opens to a custom search form if the user selects the Custom
radio button. In the custom search form, the user can choose Active,
Pending, Done, or Closed jobs upon which to search.

I have the same kind of repetition for Tasks, Sessions, Samples and Images.

There is a massive amount of conditional text among the instructions for
using these boxes.


I would like your opinions on the best way to write for the boxes.

Would you define Active Job on, say, Select Job on page 441, and Custom
Search Select Job on page 444, put a cross-reference to only the page number
441? Or, given that it's a one-line definition, would you consider it more
convenient for the reader to have the definition presented?



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