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Subject:Re: Humor in Tech Pubs From:Steve Pendleton <SPendlet -at- COGNEX -dot- COM> Date:Mon, 22 Jun 1998 13:52:18 -0700
Few jokes are funny twice, and most don't translate.
Some of your readers won't be fluent in English.
Some won't know American culture. In technical writing,
stick to standard English, and write pure, terse, minimalist
text, spider-sucked bone dry of every platelet of wit.
(The only exception I can remember permitting myself came
from a reference page documenting a function argument in a
date computation subsystem:
day Input.
The day, between 1 and max, where max equals 30 for September,
April, June, and November; max equals 31 for all other months, except
for
February, where max equals 29 during a leap year or 28 otherwise.
Which is "thirty days hath September" twisted into technobabble.)
