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Thanks for the referral to the old discussions on the word "you" replacing the word "user." I have also addressed the user with "you" for lo these 20 years, butÂI do think my post today is NOT redundant with the old discussions from 1993 that I just perused...Â
My comment earlier this afternoon on Kevin's concern was strictly aimed at situations like the one Kevin described, where a product has multiple types of users. These users usually need to know which class they belong to. For instance, a product might be an order management system and have several types of users: Order entry personnel who enter the orders, order fulfillment personnel who ship the orders, and customer service personnel who can access the system to see the status of any order a customer has a question about. In addition, that system might have various levels of business management users, who analyze the data.
Some portion of the doc has to explain the roles of these many "users" and cannot just speak to them as "you" without making clear the role of the "you" who should follow a particular set of instructions.
Also, I confess to having written a lot of installation, administrator, and programmer guides, where I address the administrator or developer as "you," but need to able to talk about all the other users of the product (or the end users of the development process) in the third person.ÂOverviews of multi-user systems also need to discuss how the product serves multiple types of users.ÂÂ
I'll reiterate here that I would refer to these users by their role names (for example, "when the order fulfillment specialist receives an alert,..."), rather than just calling them "users."
Â
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Ruth Sessions
603/886-7355
603/809-3054
________________________________
From: Milan DavidoviÄ <milan -dot- lists -at- gmail -dot- com>
To: William Sherman <bsherman77 -at- embarqmail -dot- com>
Cc: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Sent: Thursday, September 8, 2011 2:38 PM
Subject: earlier discussions of "user" (was: Grammar - The Gotcha Microsoft Gives)
On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 7:27 PM, William Sherman
<bsherman77 -at- embarqmail -dot- com> wrote:
> You should see some of what comes through in these documents. ÂI don't like
> "the user" when it is really "the customer". Didn't "user" go out after Tron
> 29 years ago?
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