Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 13:48:49 +0200 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> To: "Bruce A. Mah" <bmah@FreeBSD.ORG> Cc: John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.ORG>, Eric Ogren <eogren@stanford.edu>, freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.ORG, Chern Lee <chern@meow.osd.bsdi.com> Subject: Re: Style/Grammar/Writing Guidelines Message-ID: <20010614134849.E13153@lpt.ens.fr> In-Reply-To: <200106132316.f5DNG2365398@bmah-freebsd-0.cisco.com>; from bmah@FreeBSD.ORG on Wed, Jun 13, 2001 at 04:16:02PM -0700 References: <XFMail.010613160240.jhb@FreeBSD.org> <200106132316.f5DNG2365398@bmah-freebsd-0.cisco.com>
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Bruce A. Mah said on Jun 13, 2001 at 16:16:02: > If memory serves me right, John Baldwin wrote: > > > 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, usi > > ng > > formal English is quite appropriate. > > Appropriate, yes, but not required, IMHO. I seem to remember from my > technical writing class in college that this could be (is?) something > of a religious issue. (Well, that's not what the instructor called it, > but that's the translation into contemporary geek-speak.) No formalese, please. It's not even appropriate, except perhaps for bureaucrats and lawyers. I know, from reading academic papers, that when papers are in excessively formal language, it's for only two possible reasons. (1) the authors don't know better (and are often not native English speakers anyway). (2) The authors deliberately want to obfuscate their work because it's all pretty trivial. When the aim is to genuinely communicate information, the more informal the language, the better. (It should be *grammatical*, yes, but that's different.) If you think formal language is important to get books onto bookshelves, try "The Feynman Lectures in Physics" which is on every physicist's bookshelf, pretty much, and every single academic bookstore that I've ever seen. R To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the messagehelp
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