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Subject:Trust (was The Death of the Apostrophe) From:Wolf Lahti <wduby -at- TECHCENTER -dot- PACCAR -dot- COM> Date:Wed, 15 Nov 1995 07:06:32 -0800
Stuart Burnfield said:
>The golden rule
>is that tech writers should always strive to be consistent and correct in
>their use of English. The readers who don't know the difference won't care.
>The ones who do know the difference will come to trust your writing to
>mean what it says.
The operator/user manual is often a product's most visible form of
advertsing. If the company producing it has not seen fit to get the basics
of grammar and style into a consistent and correct form, why in the world
should I believe that any care has gone into the product itself? A misplaced
apostrophe or hyphen is a little thing, yes--but it is so easy to correct
that I can't help but wonder what bigger problems were overlooked in the
product's release as well.
And this is true whether the product is a computer program, a VCR, or a bicycle.
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"I hate quotations."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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