Re: Article in front of hardware or software

[voxwoman <voxwoman -at- gmail -dot- com>]

And, depending on your legal department, you may be required to use the noun
as an adjective to protect the trade name.

"Aspirin" used to be a trademarked name for an analgesic, and was the
example used in the advertising class I took in college. (Band-Aid and
Kleenex also nearly lost their brand names because of their use in common
language).

It got really awkward in one manual I was writing to use an article before
the product name every single time, but our marketing department demanded we
do so.

-Wendy

On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 3:49 PM, Andrew Warren <awarren -at- synaptics -dot- com>
wrote:

> SB wrote:
>
> > It was always my impression that when referring to a product XYZ in a
> > sentence, you use the article "the".  Configure *the* XYZ Switch as
> > follows...
> >
> > However, with software, you omit it. For example: Use Microsoft Word
> to
> > author your documentation. Then again, you could say use the XYZ
> Switch
> > application...
> >
> > Is there a grammatical rule for this?
>
> Um, this isn't a hardware/software difference... What you're seeing is
> the difference between proper nouns and nouns -- proper or common --
> used as adjectives.
>
> Proper nouns:
>
>    Microsoft Word
>    Google
>    Mount Rushmore
>    Sylvia
>
> Nouns used as adjectives:
>
>    The XYZ Switch
>    The power cable
>    The Washington Monument
>    The Microsoft Word application
>
> -Andrew
>
> === Andrew Warren  - awarren -at- synaptics -dot- com
> === Synaptics, Inc - Santa Clara, CA
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Microsoft Office, team authoring, plus more.
http://www.DocToHelp.com/TechwrlList

True single source, conditional content, PDF export, modular help.
Help & Manual is the most powerful authoring tool for technical
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