Re: At what point does software become an application?

[David Castro <thetechwriter -at- YAHOO -dot- COM>]

--- Jan Stanley <janron -at- CONCENTRIC -dot- NET> wrote:
> I like a little variety in my prose.  If the user is likely to
> see "Bill,"  "the Bill software," "the software," "CompanyName's
> Bill," and even "the application" and "the program" as referring
> to the same thing, I like to mix 'em up in documentation so that
> readers don't get bored to tears by reading the same term over
> and over and over again.

Is it safe to assume that you're being facetious in your first paragraph? The
only time you should "mix up" terms is when it enhances the understandability
of a single sentence (when the term is used several times in the one sentence,
and you can't use pronouns). If you aren't consistent in your documentation, it
makes users wonder if there is some difference between "the Bill software" and
"Bill" that they aren't catching on to.

We had a contractor who followed the whole "use a different word to make it a
more pleasant reading experience" methodology, and we had to scrap what she
wrote and start it over when her contract expired. She mixed dialog with
dialogue, window, screen, pane, and so on. The user couldn't tell what end was
up (hey, *WE* had a hard time telling which end was up!).

Mix it up in fiction, sure. But leave technical documentation blah and
understandable!

-David Castro
 techwrtr -at- crl -dot- com
 thetechwriter -at- yahoo -dot- com

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