7 Oct
2011
7 Oct
'11
6:19 p.m.
Since this thread has gone completely off at a tangent, how about this:
Shouldn't the sentence
"They were an HP9866 printer, an HP71 and an HP82165 GPIO unit, and an
home-made interface"
be
"They were an HP9866 printer, an HP71 and an HP82165 GPIO unit, and *a*
home-made interface "
and similarly
"a 'Oxford comma' "
should be
"*an* 'Oxford comma' "
?
(since "HP" is pronounced "aitch-pee" (beginning with a vowel sound)
and
"home-made" begins with a consonant sound).
Seriously though, I agree with Tony that sometimes minute details of
punctuation, quoting etc can be extremely significant. I spent four
years writing installation instructions for Unix software for Ericsson,
and during the review of every document, such details were always taken
extremely seriously, since it was intended that the reader of the
document should be able to reproduce every command exactly as intended,
otherwise the installation would fail, or be done incorrectly. Obviously
a Unix command line is very sensitive to dots, spaces, upper/lower case etc.
Another aspect which I think is important is that documentation which
contains spelling errors, bad grammar, bad translations etc reflects
badly on a product which may be excellent otherwise. If you can't be
bothered to produce correctly spelt, grammatically correct
documentation, what is to say that the product itself is any better?
/Jonas
On Thu, 6 Oct 2011 21:11:03 +0100 (BST), ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony
Duell) wrote:
The text 'I used 3 devices at my HPCC
demonstration this year. They were
an HP9866 printer, an HP71 and an HP82165 GPIO unit and an home-made
interface' makes little sense. But adding the extra comma 'I used 3
devices at my HPCC demonstration this year. They were an HP9866 printer,
an HP71 and an HP82165 GPIO unit, and an home-made interface' implies
that the first deivce was the printer, the second device was the HP71
together with the 82165 interface and the third device was the home-made
interface.
I beleive doing this is called a 'Oxford comma'.
11 Oct
11 Oct
2:17 p.m.
Since this thread has gone completely off at a tangent, how about this:
Shouldn't the sentence
"They were an HP9866 printer, an HP71 and an HP82165 GPIO unit, and an
home-made interface"
be
"They were an HP9866 printer, an HP71 and an HP82165 GPIO unit, and *a*
home-made interface "
and similarly
"a 'Oxford comma' "
should be
"*an* 'Oxford comma' "
Yes, you are absolutely correct. Mea Culpa.
I susepct the secodn one is becuase I always think of 'Oxford' as
'The_Other_Place' to so tm it starts with a consolant. I even once asked
for a return train ticked to 'The Other Place' and got a very odd look...
?
(since "HP" is pronounced "aitch-pee" (beginning with a vowel sound)
and
"home-made" begins with a consonant sound).
Seriously though, I agree with Tony that sometimes minute details of
punctuation, quoting etc can be extremely significant. I spent four
The primary purpose of any piece of writing is to communicate. A
desirable feature (although that is most certainly secondary to
'communication') is that it looks nice on the page.
So yes, follow typesetting conventions where you can, but not if they
obscure or corrupt the meaning. And since technical text (particularly
computer software manuals) often have to use punctuation marks in
non-standard ways, sometimes flowwing typesetting conventions blindly
will make nonsense of the text.
Of coruse it's best to rewrite the text so that it can be printed using
accepted typesettign rules and still has the correct meaning _if you
can_. I suspect that's impossible with some Forth documentation, though :-)
-tony
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