Re: What kind of names do you make up?

[Steven Jong <SteveFJong -at- AOL -dot- COM>]

Mark L. Levinson <mark -at- MEMCO -dot- CO -dot- IL> wrote:

>> So what about facetious names?  Well, Maurice Rose puts it clearly:
>> "when the product is difficult to make sense of, and the guide isn't
>> helping much - the attempts at humour make me want to strangle somebody."
>> You don't want people to think the writers were spending their time
>> giggling when they should have been concentrating on making the product
>> comprehensible.

When I started with my current employer, all examples used cartoon-character
names. There was a technical reason for this, but the examples looked
startling to me then, and when I could I ended the practice. Also, every
person in our examples lived in Waltham, Massachusetts; can't think why 8^)
Now they come from places like Duxbury and Westford, or Schenectady, New York
(ZIP Code 12345).

(I like Mark's idea about a "name disclaimer" in the legalese page.)

I disagree with the "rainbow coalition" comment. At least in the US, examples
of names from the general population will and should vary. There are also
technical benefits from considering names that don't follow Anglo-Saxon
convention. For example, let's say your software requires and stores customer
names, and your engineers keep a first, middle, and last name. How will the
database store the name Oscar de la Hoya? How about Oscar Hammerstein III?
What if King Oscar wants to buy?  Did the engineers put length limits on
names? Is it possible for a last name to have only two characters? (I have
relatives with two-character last names.) How about one? How about long
names? How about names with accented characters?

Aside from exercising the software, one other reason for diversity in names
is the possibility of international sales. If you are trying to sell to a
different country, I think it would behoove you to draw examples from that
culture's places and names. I don't know if this is something a translation
firm can do, but to me it seems like a necessary step. Westford probably
doesn't sound right to someone reading my manual in Tokyo...

          -- Steve

=========|=========|=========|=========|=========|=========|=====
Steven Jong, Documentation Team Manager ("Typo?  What tpyo?")
Lightbridge, Inc., 67 South Bedford St., Burlington, MA 01803 USA
mailto:jong -at- lightbridge -dot- com -dot- nospam          781.359.4902 [voice]
Home Sweet Homepage: http://members.aol.com/SteveFJong


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