RE: Basic Voice ??s: OK for Software to "allow", "let", "enable", --- "pr ovide" and so forth?

[Alan Bucher <bucherino -at- yahoo -dot- com>]

Jan Henning wrote:
>>"Enter the Pentagon database by entering the secret password."
>>"Enter the secret password to enter the Pentagon database."
>>"To enter the Pentagon database, enter the secret password."
>>are all shorter, more succinct, user-oriented ways to say the same
>>thing.
>
>True, and they are better suited to steps in a procedure. However,
>in a description of a feature or process (which I believe the
>original question was about), they don't work well.

That's why I listed three rewordings, some of which work better in a
procedure, some of which work perfectly well in a description. My
point being that you can always reword the sentence to be more
succinct and avoid the "allows you" construction. That works for
either a procedure or a feature description.

>There, it is
>usually better to say something like "Entering the secret password
>lets you access the Pentagon database."

There's still no need to use "lets you"--or even "entering"--in that
case. If you're describing the feature, presumably there's a
preceding sentence along the lines of "The database is protected by a
secret password." Therefore, any of:

  "Enter the Pentagon database by entering the secret password."
  "To enter the Pentagon database, you must enter the secret
   password."
  "You will need to enter this password to access the database."

are better than the "allows you" construction.

The secret password doesn't "let you" do anything. It is a thing, and
you--the user--must use this thing in combination with another thing
to achieve the result. Whether you're doc'ing a procedure or a
concept, it's still all about the user and the software actually
doing things.




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