Re: Functionality vs Function - My Mistake!

[Tim Altom <taltom -at- SIMPLYWRITTEN -dot- COM>]

Aside from often being programmer-spawned jargon, I think the problem with
"ality" and "ism" is that they permit the writer to be lazy. Instead of
zeroing in on a specific thing, you can toss all the specifics into a common
basket and refer to the "functionality" of the application. Then the word
itself can become fuzzy enough to cause writers like you to pause.
Functionality has been used for "reliability", "breadth of features offered"
and many other things.

I'd lean toward scrounging up a thesaurus or a markerboard and start jotting
down the specifics within your functionality basket and see if they're even
related to one another. That'll let you break down the weasel word
"functionality" into whatever it's composed of in your organization.


>Thanks for the responses - This was my mistake!  Functionally is the
>adverb. Functionality is the noun - to describe a package of functions.
>I'm still thinking it's an informal noun? Somewhere along the line, I
>got the impression adding endings like ality, ism etc is a bad thing?
>Any comments? Because I still don't like it. The other suggested word
>was features. Thanks Vickie

Tim Altom
Simply Written, Inc.
317.899.5882
http://www.simplywritten.com
Creators of the Clustar Method for task-based documentation

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