Quoting cathy gramze ([EMAIL PROTECTED]): > The third person is, unfortunately, the most common voice in which most > manuals and documentation are written in English. The second voice is > considered to be too informal for "professional" writing. This is very slowly > changing as the functional illiteracy rate in the US skyrockets. The formal > third person is becoming just too difficult for many Americans to read and > comprehend.
Not only in English. We have the same difference between formal and informal documentation writing in French. Moreover, my own personal culture of scientific publications, both in English and French, makes me often use a very neutral wording, and often indeed the passive form. This especially applies to a program official documentation while this may be different for a book *about* a given program.... In documentation writing, there is no strict "forbidding" of using the second person. The only one strict requirement is NEVER EVER use the FIRST person (and, dammit, we still have a bunch of things in Debian which DO NOT respect this and say "I will do this" or "We recommend that"). The problem of second person in English in also translation. We all know that the use in each language is very different about that (du/Sie in german, tu/usted in Spanish, tu/vous in French). Depending on the country, the second singular person may sound as very familiar...or just not too informal : I would for instance never use "tu" in French documentation and man pages while it seems that this is not a big problem for other languages. So, avoiding second person in English is also a way to help translators not having headaches... > The use of "he" in English for a person of unknown gender was > standard, and was commonly regarded as including women, until the > feminist movement in the early 1970s. I find the use of "he/she" to > be stilted, and to interrupt the flow of what I am reading. I sometime use he/she, especially in situation where I want to make very clear that I do have concerns about gender neutrality...so quite often in my free software work..:-)...however, I often forget also so I'm sometimes inconsistent on that matter (but my concerns are not inconsistent, dammit).
