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Lauren
But what if the next step in the procedure involves doing something with
the window that is opened? Wouldn't you then need to make a point of
first saying that the window is opened?
David
> I guess where we're coming from is that to say something "appears,"
> implied that it magically appears -- POOF! Like Cinderella's fairy god
> mother APPEARED to her.
When you look up in the sky, do clouds "appear" or are they "displayed"?
I prefer to avoid this repeating discussion and, after dealing with the
controversy of "Displays v. Appears," I try to avoid the use of the
terms
altogether. "Displays" or "appears" usually refers to the existence of
a
window, a screen, or a prompt. This existence is the result of some
action
and the action should produce some result. In other cases of actions,
we do
not go into detail about the existence of the result, we just refer to
the
result that should be there if the action was performed correctly.
Like, when an instruction tells a user how to apply bold to text. 1.
Select
the text. 2. Choose bold from the format menu (or whatever). We do not
then follow this with "and the text will appear (or display in) bold.
So,
why do we need to announce that an action opened a window?
I realize that when computer technology was new and people were learning
about how actions can cause "windows" to open, we needed to describe
this
occurrence. But now, people know about windows; they don't need their
documentation dumbed-down to explain that a window or a screen or a
prompt
will become available after an action, they know applications do these
things.
Lauren
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