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When such questions come up, I look for public style guides and industry
standards.
The ANSI Z535.6-2011 (R2017) standard on product safety information comes
to my mind first in this case because it defines signal words for safety
messages (corresponding to levels of risk, namely âDANGER,â âWARNING,â
âCAUTION,â and âNOTICEâ).
The âNoteâ heading in your question is similar to signal words, and the
standard is analogous to your example as it explicitly allows to combine
multiple safety messages into one.
The question of singular vs. plural for signal words, however, is discussed
not once in this standard. There is no mentioning of, for example, when to
use the plural âWARNINGSâ instead of âWARNINGâ (which makes sense to me
considering their purpose of signaling levels of risk).
Signal words (and their translations in the standardâs annex) are only ever
listed and used as singulars.
On Tue 19. Apr 2022 at 20:24 Nelson Vargas <nelson -dot- vargas -at- gmail -dot- com> wrote:
> Dear List,
>
> My colleagues and I are wondering how best to handle the situation where we
> include a single note anywhere in our content or multiple Notes. The
> specific issue we are puzzling over is whether to title a list of notes
> with the word Note or the plural form Notes. Our only reason for going with
> the singular is to avoid forgetting to add the s when using the plural.
> It's simpler to just add Note everywhere.
>
> This came up after we decided to move away from using a run-in title with
> just Note for every individual note. In our Help, that often appear a bit
> heavy, so we're trying a bulleted list with either Note or Notes as the
> signal word.
>
> With Gratitude,
> Nelson Vargas
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