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Subject:A question of grammar vs. brevity. From:"Downing, David" <DavidDowning -at- users -dot- com> To:<techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Thu, 2 Oct 2008 11:04:23 -0500
I want to create a single section of a document that deals with both
adding information to and removing information from something. The
completely grammatically correct heading for this section would be
something like:
"Adding [the information] to and removing [the information] from [the
thing]."
I would like to avoid repeating "[the information]."
One way of handling it would be to remove "[the thing]," from the
heading and have it read simply "Adding and removing[the information]."
The reason I hesitate to do that is that the heading would then be
inconsistent with the other headings in the document,
The second way to do it would be to say:
"Adding and removing [the information] to/from the thing."
The problem with that would be the use of the "to/from" things, which is
one of those perversions of proper grammar. My inclination is to go
ahead and do it anyway and let our editor decide if it's okay, but I was
wondering what everyone here would do.
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