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Ken,
Tell Marine that Navy does not use the hyphen. Then he'll want to use it.
Seriously, there may be no best answer for him. Give him example of 1 pin
connector. Without hyphen it causes problems for reader.
We use GPO style manual for this, and pretty sure it is in there.
On Feb 20, 2017 15:19, "Ken Poshedly" <poshedly -at- bellsouth -dot- net> wrote:
My American manager is a nice guy (about age 60, and I'm seven years older)
but he is not a true tech writer. He is an ex-Marine who had written the
technical stuff for a heavy equipment dealer where he was employed for some
years, and very proud of it. And he certainly knows his stuff from a
technical side of things. Absolutely. Many times, he'll forward a Word
document for me to format (we use FrameMaker 11.0) that he has written and
I'll usually find little stuff to fix, but then he'll quibble with me about
it. I usually give in because he's the boss.
In today's document from him is the phrase "7 pin connector". My fix was
to simply add a hyphen to make it "7-pin connector". But he objected and I
VERY diplomatically told him that in our industry, it is common to take
mechanics and other factory workers with oodles of line experience and
throw them in front of a keyboard to write the manuals, thus the rough
grammar, etc. And blindly copying what somebody else wrote means
replicating their errors (if any). He agrees but says that he has NEVER
seen various things that I show him in any other tech manuals by other
companies in this industry.
So what is the official rule for the use of hyphenated modifiers. Like I
said, this is VERY minor but good writing is supposed to be correct in
punctuation as well as word usage, etc. And this isn't even a tech writing
rule, but a punctuation rule that should apply everywhere.
So if anyone has a website (ESPECIALLY a heavy construction equipment
website) that shows correct usage, or a website that states the correct
punctuation rules, I'd be much obliged. Hopefully, I'll be able to
reference it for future "things."
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