Uttered Karsten Wade <kwade(a)redhat.com>, spake thus:
Ah, my favorite part of documentation mailing lists, the grammar
debates. :)
How can there be debate when I am right?
Once you accept that, you quickly find that you never need the
passive
voice. Even to avoid awkward sentence structure. If you want to say
that something "will happen", it either "is going to happen" or
"might
happen."
+1
But the commanding voice examples such as, "You will click the
OK
button," actually is more confusing than commanding.
Agreed. We are not Micro$oft to command our users...
I once worked for a company whose standard was that all titles must
be gerund phrases ("Opening A File") on the theory the gerund for
relates to a specific task or action, thus avoiding the document
becoming a littany of feature descriptions and bullet lists. After
all, every feature is provided to accomplish a given task, no?
However, this makes for exceedingly ugly documents and I don't like
the grund rule but I do like their focus on tasks and not features.
Use cases of the world, unite!
--
I'm already an anomaly, I shall soon be an anachronism, and I have
every intention of dying an abuse!