RE: WRONG!..... -ish?

["McLauchlan, Kevin" <Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com>]

The covers are like those little plastic sleeves 
that formerly protected the pins of serial cables 
(am I dating myself just a tad?) and the loose 
ends of monitor cables, before you unpacked 
and connected. 

They cover a couple of connectors on a PCIe card 
that would be the connection-points-of-choice 
if the card were purchased stand-alone and installed 
in a customer's computer/server. But when that 
card is pre-installed in a special server product 
the needed signals are taken from headers on 
the card and directed throughout the server 
and to its front panel. The exposed back-panel 
connectors are essentially ignored in that 
application. If you attempt to use them, you'll 
either get no joy at all or get indeterminate or 
unreliable results.  

So, no warnings, no cautions, just a faint hope 
of preventing unnecessary calls to Tech Support. 

It was a Tech Support or Sales Eng guy who suggested 
the original text (a Brit, if I recall). I'm comfortable 
with it, as I'm accustomed to spoken and written English 
with some words dropped as "understood".   But some 
people make a good point about ESL readers, so I'm 
leaning toward an edit. 

My original question was more along the lines of:
Is it "legal" to drop the "do" as understood in 
that situation. But the weight of opinion is that 
that doesn't matter in the face of the greater 
importance of being understood by ESL readers.

 -k



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Gene Kim-Eng [mailto:techwr -at- genek -dot- com]
> Sent: February-02-12 10:05 PM
> To: McLauchlan, Kevin; techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
> Subject: Re: WRONG!..... -ish?
> 
> Context, please, why do you recommend, rather than caution or warn, and
> what's the worst that can happen if they do remove the covers?
> 
> At the very least, I would change the end of the sentence to "not
> remove the
> factory-installed covers."
> 
> Gene Kim-Eng
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "McLauchlan, Kevin" <Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com>
> To: <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
> Sent: Thursday, February 02, 2012 5:52 PM
> Subject: WRONG!..... -ish?
> 
> 
> > "We recommend that you not remove the covers that were installed at
> the
> > factory."
> >
> > "We recommend that you do not remove the covers that were installed
> at the
> > factory."
> >
> > Is the first sentence flatly wrong, or is this a matter of style or
> > formality?
> >
> > I'm at home, and my trusty Fowler's and my Strunk & White are at the
> > office.

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