Re: Usage of second person or third person when writing procedures

["Michael West" <mbwest -at- bigpond -dot- net -dot- au>]

Easy.

"Dinner should be eaten before dessert" is NOT an instruction.
It is the statement of a rule or principal. Check your Info Mapping
class notes if you don't want to take my word for it.

I'd welcome any exceptions to this, but technical writing and
instructional writing textbooks and handbooks are, so far as I
know, unanimously in favor of direct address when writing
instructions.

Few professional instructional writers would even consider doing
it any other way. In fact, I don't believe it is even *possible* to cast
an instruction in other than implied second person. "Someone should
do this" is not an instruction. "Do this" is.

A couple of years ago there was a thread on this list that started
by someone stating that her writing teacher had advised students
*not* to use "you" in technical documentation. The responses went
on at some length, mostly asserting that the instructor was wrong.
Remarkably in a list used by professional users of language, not *one*
respondent picked up on the important difference between "technical
documentation" and "instructional material".

Few experts would consider an ordinary user guide or procedure
manual to be "technical documentation." Their purpose is to
instruct, and you can't (as I've suggested above) instruct without
using direct address.

Technical documentation, on the other hand -- which would include
things like specification and design documents and technical
references -- would have little use for second person. Their purpose
is (generally) not to instruct, but to describe. Their audience is
indeterminate--unlike that of a user guide, which is (or should be)
targetted.

In other words, we shouldn't write "you" when we don't know who
"you" might be. This comes down to common sense rather than to
some arcane rule of what is "right" or "wrong".

In a user guide, we *do* know who "you" is. At least, we'd damn well
better know. In technical documentation, we usually do not know. It
doesn't really matter, because we are not telling the readers what they
should do but only describing the physical and performance characteristics
of a system or other entity. These are written not to *instruct* but to
*describe* -- and  therefore the second person is not required.

And so the instructor, whose competence was quite seriously maligned
in this forum, turns out to have been quite correct. It was the student
who wasn't paying enough attention.

__
Michael West
Melbourne, Australia





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