Re: Clearing the check marks

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

I have a strong dislike for this kind of writing -- amounting to a kind of
revulsion, actually. You are supposed to be helping your users understand
what they are doing. You don't help them by telling them they are "selecting
boxes." Those boxes represent something, and that something is what you
should be talking about. The boxes are irrelevant; they are an artifact of
interface design. Your users are selecting OPTIONS of some sort--not
"boxes."

	"What kind of work do you do?" 
	"Oh, I select boxes."

You are twice wrong about "make sure". It is not colloquial, and it is not
passive.

"Ensure" is fine too.

But please get rid of all that selecting of boxes. Make your writing
task-oriented. Make it subject-matter-oriented. Make it real-world oriented.

What are you thinking about when you write that the "checkboxes...need to be
deselected"?  It is ludicrous to attribute "needs" to checkboxes on a form. 

There is no need to propagate ugly, bogus words like "deselect."

"Clearing the options" (or, if you insist, the "boxes") works fine. But
please explain to your users what they are really doing -- in the real world
-- when they select or clear boxes.

-- 
Mike West


> When you are instructing a user that all checkboxes on a form or
> dialogue box need to be deselected, with no way of knowing if any of
> them may be selected at any given time, how do you write the step?
> 
> I'm assuming MSMoS preferences here. I'm more interested in syntax
> than in terminology (all suggestions are welcome, though). 
> 
> 1) Deselect all check boxes. (Simple, and active, but there may be
> none that need to be deselected.)
> 
> 2) Make sure all check boxes are deselected. (Is "make sure" a
> colloquialism that may not translate well? It's kind of folksy to my
> eye, and also passive.)
> 
> 3) Ascertain that all check boxes are deselected. (Is "ascertain" a
> two-bit word that sounds stuffy and may not be understood by all
> users? And passive!)
> 
> 4) Ensure that all check boxes are deselected. (Same problems as
> ascertain, plus I try not to use words that are easily confused with
> other words, such as "Insure," because someone will always ask if you
> used the right one, or worse, will use the wrong one later.)

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