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Subject:Re: Interacting with a touchscreen From:Ned Bedinger <doc -at- edwordsmith -dot- com> To:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com Date:Mon, 29 Dec 2008 19:15:21 -0800
Boudreaux, Madelyn (GE Healthcare, consultant) wrote:
> I'm trying to institute using unique and appropriate verbs for
> interacting with different input devices in documents: press a key,
> click an on-screen button, etc., so that a user never has to wonder
> which device is being referenced when she sees a given verb.
>
> "Touch," is, in the words of one person, "creepy." There are no more
> good touches, only bad ones, I guess. To be fair, I hate it in this
> usage; it's so very passive sounding, even in conjunction with
> "touchscreen."
My advice is to keep these subjective evaluations in perspective. Many
of us have personal hang-ups about certain words in technical writing. A
favorite example, reported in a techwr-l discussion a year or two ago,
was an aversion to using the word "training" because, the writer said,
it brought to mind trained circus animals. The writer felt it was
degrading to suggest to the audience that they were circus seals.
>
> I had wanted to preserve "click" for onscreen buttons and "press" for
> keys on a keyboard or other external keypad (of which we have both, of
> course
We're all more or less trapped by the ascendence of one or a few style
guides, a condition that has effectively blocked access to the useful
and usable variety of naturally expressive words that English provides.
'Keyboard' was once used in its intransitive sense to instruct users to
use the keyboard to enter characters. To me personally, keyboard equated
typing with skateboarding or surfing, lending a sublime sense of
recreation, and I liked that. But today, thanks to MS MOS and the few
mainly geeky style guides in use, all we get is 'press', which to me
puts typing on the level of drudgery, something done on laundry day to
smooth wrinkled clothes after washing and drying, or something done with
hydraulic pressure to form shapes in metal. It could mangle my hands if
I were ever to get momentarily distracted while doing it.
Admittedly, skating and surfing aren't always thrilling or perfectly
safe either, but these associations are vastly more appropriate and
preferable to those that come with press. IMHO, keyboard could be added
to style guides, and would enhance the precision, accuracy, and
aesthetics of instructions. At the least, it could free up 'press' to
take on less specific referents.
>
> Does anyone have a magic word for me?
Touch the [symbol] on the screen.
>
> Please, and thank you (my other magic words for the day...)!
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