"Developers Guide", "Developers' Guide", or "Developer's Guide"

[Gordon McLean]

Spot on Fred. "Installing..." it is.
 
And yes, the upfront design of a documentation set is usually not ever
performed, legacy documents are maintained and added to, with new ones
falling into place as you go along. Of course then, when you rename things
to make them sensible and consistent, outcry! 
 
Can't win. ;-)
 
Gordon
 

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From: Fred Ridder [mailto:docudoc at hotmail.com] 
Sent: 13 February 2008 13:51
To: Gordon McLean; techwr-l at lists.techwr-l.com
Subject: RE: "Developers Guide", "Developers' Guide", or "Developer's Guide"


Gordon McLean wrote:

> Which prompts me to ponder why the other types aren't titled:
> 
> Using [product name]
> Developing with/on/for ...
> 
> In other words, if an Installation Guide is focussed on the task of
> installing a product, why aren't the others focussed on the tasks of
using,
> developing, maintaining, administering... etc.
 
If parallelism is the goal, these titles still have a problem unless you
give
the guide that covers installation a title of the form "Installing [product 
name]".  And while I do like using verb participles (sometimes referred to
as gerunds, even though they are usually not being used as nouns) in 
headings that idenitfy procedures, I'm not crazy about them in titles
of works.  
 
But what *can* work in many cases is to form titles with the noun
for the task being documented rather than the person performing the 
task, as in:
  Administration Guide
  Development Guide (or perhaps Application Development Guide)
  Installation Guide 
  Maintenance Guide
The one place where this approach is awkward is the classic one,
namely the user's guide.  But part of the problem may be that this
title is often used for a catch-all document that contains information
on multiple tasks (e.g. installation and configuration as well as how
to use the product, plus some reference information just for good 
measure).  So the problem may be a more fundamental one of
information design than a simple matter of an awkward title. 
 
Fred Ridder
 
 
 


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