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Subject:Re: RE: Don't say what you CANNOT do in documents From:Susan W. Gallagher <sgallagher5 -at- cox -dot- net> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Wed, 21 Apr 2004 14:04:02 -0400
To which I reply with the tech writing mantra, "It depends
on your audience!" ;-)
I agree that there are some audiences that we need to
address conservatively, but I believe that they are fewer
and farther between than you would imagine.
At the high end of the user spectrum are IT professionals --
programmers and sysadmins. This is not a linguistically
conservative audience, at least in my experience. Closing
compounds and collectivising/singularizing traditional
plurals can happen here first. The audience appears to have
little to no trouble in accepting linguistic drift as
normal. (Note - this is my opinion based on feedback
received after some 10 years of writing to IT professionals.)
At the low end of the user spectrum is the housewife and
blue-collar worker, the WalMart Associate, ... . These
folks think that television English is correct English.
Ever wonder what happened to the "of" after "couple" or
the possessive before a gerund? They are gone,
linguistically, from most of the novels on the best-
seller list and almost all of the scripts on television.
This audience, while responsible for most of the linguistic
drift, wouldn't notice it if they tripped over it.
Who's left? Accountants, HR professionals, other college-
educated office workers. If they are your target audience,
you need to decide how sensitive - and how resistant - they
are to linguistic drift and act accordingly.
> My personal view is that in technical writing it's safer to be a little
> conservative about adoting new usages and neologisms. If a word or usage is
> "becoming accepted", that means to me that there are still some people to
> whom it's not yet acceptable.
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