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What an interesting thread. Most of what I'm reading is very well
reasoned.
My own 2 cents is this:
Many early pc manuals were written by software engineers who weren't
really writers and didn't have the time to do them properly in any
case. One of the big problems was that these early manuals were
weighed down by ponderous, passive sentences that made them hard to
read. I'm not sure, but I kind of suspect that this style is a
carry-over from the academic world, which generally looks down on
second-person writing as "common" or at least "non-scholarly."
It's taken the industry a while to understand that users don't give a
damn about how scholarly a manual sounds. What most users want isn't
fancy writing. In my opinion, the user wants a concise overview of the
subject, or a quick, clear answer to a specific question. The simpler
the language, the better.
It's too bad that there are still companies that aren't getting this.
As recently as a year ago, when I was working mostly on contract, I
worked a job where the writers were absolutely forbidden to use the
first or second person at any time. As a result, a simple sentence
like ... "We suggest you set your monitor to its highest resolution"
became the monstrosity ... "The vendor of this product recommends that
the user set his or her monitor to the highest resolution that he or
she can obtain." This is not a joke. It is a real edit the project
leader made to my text.
When my manuscript came back with the edits, there was a little
Post-It note on the cover. The note read: "We don't use 'we' and we
don't use 'you.'
Fortunately, it seems like we're starting to see less and less of
this. But I'd be interested to know how many folks have had similar
experiences in the past.
Jennifer (Kraus) Jelinek
Technical Writer, Web Wonk, and newlywed
jlkraus -at- ametekwater -dot- com
Sheboygan, WI
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