Re: Use of "your"

[Matthew Stern <MAStern -at- PLATSOFT -dot- COM>]

In response to Kris Olberg and Jeff Jansen about the use of "your": At a
former employer, we used to make liberal use of the third person in
general because it was supposedly more "user friendly" and
"conversational".

Then, an editor that we hired pointed out that the reader of the manual
might not be the owner of the product. It may be a service technician
who is fixing someone else's computer, or a clerk who is using a
company's computer. In these cases, "your" doesn't make sense because
the product is someone else's. We continued to address the reader
directly by using the second person, but we refer to the product as "the
computer" or "the software".

I don't think it loses anything to use "the" versus "your" in describing
a product. The point of the documentation is to teach the user how to
use the product. When a user can operate the product successfully, it
gives him or her more of a connection to the product than whether or not
the manual addresses the product as "yours".

============================================
Matthew Stern
Sr. Technical Writer
Platinum Software Corporation

E-mail: mastern -at- platsoft -dot- com
Web: http://members.aol.com/mastrn/

"The number of practices, disgusting or exciting,
usual or unusual, in which you wish to engage in
private is of no concern to society."
     -- Judith Martin (Miss Manners)

The opinions here are solely my own.
============================================

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