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Carol Peruzzi poses the following puzzle sentence: <<An underscore
character, or a series of them, contained in the text of the item, causes
the cursor to automatically move there and select the underscores as soon as
that item receives focus on the Funding Checklist in Empower runtime.>>
The biggest problem is that there's no sense of sequence: what happens
first, then what happens next? So far as I can tell, here's what happens:
(1) Empower runtime focuses on an item in the Funding Checklist. (2) If
there are any underscores in the text, the cursor automatically selects
them. (The rest of the details are mighty fuzzy; how does one cursor select
multiple, noncontiguous underscores, and in what language does the phrase
"receives focus on" make sense?) But based on that shaky understanding of
what's going on, I'd venture the following rewrite: "When Empower's runtime
[module?]focuses on [begins to work on?] an item in the Funding Checklist,
it automatically checks to see whether the text contains any underscores; if
it does, the cursor automatically selects them." Feel free to elaborate and
clarify as necessary.
"Technical writing... requires understanding the audience, understanding
what activities the user wants to accomplish, and translating the often
idiosyncratic and unplanned design into something that appears to make
sense."--Donald Norman, The Invisible Computer
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