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David Downing suggested: <<... casting the material in the second person
wherever possible, because it kills two birds with one stone. It avoid the
gender problem and addresses the user directly, thus getting rid of that
snooty academic third-person thing.>>
That works for many applications, but not where you're talking about users
whose activities are being managed by your reader. Consider, for example,
documentation written for a network manager who must understand the tasks
users of the network must be able to perform. If you say "you", you're
writing to the network manager, but if someone else must do the work, that's
misleading. Thus, you have to talk about the users in the third person, and
there's nothign snooty about it. Here's a somewhat facetious example of
mixing the various voices:
"I know you won't like this, but you're going to have to configure the
network so that users--including anonymous crackers on the Internet--can
destroy your company's files. That's the Windows philosophy, after all. (To
do this, set the read, write, change, and delete permissions so that
everyone, wherever they might be on the network, can mangle files every bit
as efficiently as you can.) When they discover they can do this, they'll
have no end of fun. Trustworthy computing!"
--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada
"It's one thing to see death coming at the hands of your own creation.
That's part of the human epic tradition, after all. Oedipus and his father.
Baron Frankenstein and his monster. William Henry Gates and Windows
'09."--David Brin, _Kiln People_
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