Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 16:02:40 -0700 (PDT) From: John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org> To: Eric Ogren <eogren@stanford.edu> Cc: freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.org, Chern Lee <chern@meow.osd.bsdi.com> Subject: RE: Style/Grammar/Writing Guidelines Message-ID: <XFMail.010613160240.jhb@FreeBSD.org> In-Reply-To: <MLELJDKBCMIACMHOENLGGEOLCEAA.eogren@stanford.edu>
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On 13-Jun-01 Eric Ogren wrote: > Speaking as someone who's contributed a decent amount of stuff to the > Handbook (in fact, I'm pretty sure that the passage you quoted was revised > by me about a year ago), I don't particularly see a problem with the tone. > Admittedly, I'm biased, but I don't really think of the Handbook as a > technical, formal document -- I think of it as more of a "Here's how you use > FreeBSD." The majority of the chapters are targeted towards more > non-technical users, and as such, I think the fact that a lot of the > handbook has an informal tone is actually a good thing. I find "You may need > to prepare some floppy disks" just a lot nicer to read than "The first step > to installing FreeBSD is to create the kern and mfsroot floppy disks." > Again, I'm biased, since I much prefer to write informally, but that's my 2 > cents. Recall that the Handbook is formally published as an actual book that will hopefuly be put on the shelf at your local bookstore. With that in mind, using formal English is quite appropriate. -- John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org> -- http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/ PGP Key: http://www.baldwin.cx/~john/pgpkey.asc "Power Users Use the Power to Serve!" - http://www.FreeBSD.org/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message
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