On 9/12/2013 7:57 PM, Don Welty wrote: > Please consider the following suggestions: > > This > document is Copyright © 2012 by its contributors as listed below. You may > distribute it > and/or modify it under the terms of the Creative Commons > Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license > (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/), version 3.0 or later. > The "and/" should be deleted since it does not add anything and is basically > useless. In a law document, it is useless.
My first reaction was to think, "yes, style guides have always instructed to avoid 'and/or'." Then I looked at the current edition of the APA Style guide (the one applicable to my own work) and found that there had been a change in recommendations since the edition I had on my shelf. > The phrase "A and B" excludes all else and means "both A and B". The > phrase "A or B" is inclusive and means, A, B, or both A and B. Who we are and > what we do > The > LibreOffice Documentation team is a group of volunteers who strive to > provide high quality guides for LibreOffice users and developers. You > can become part of the Documentation team by contributing to one or > more of our many projects. No matter what your level of experience > is, you can make a valuable contribution. > > If you wish to imply that the group succeeds in writing high quality guides, > take out strive. Just my two cents but the documents are collectively produced by (not provided) by a large number of individuals with varying degrees of expertise in technical writing. My sense is that most individuals are trying to communicate some complex ideas in a way that can be understood by anyone who picks up the document. Individuals can succeed in writing high quality documents (the word "succeed" referring to "writing") but the quality of the content, how understandable (I know that's not a proper word) it is to people of different backgrounds--that's not as easy to evaluate as the quality of the writing. In light of that, it makes sense to me to say that the team strives to provide high quality work. > Also, the word "provide" is an overused word that is imprecise. Use > "produce" instead. Once the documents are produced, they are provided to the community. Perhaps the word choice should be "to" versus "produced." > Examples of current projects: > * User guides > * Tutorials and how-tos > * Blog > * Quick reference cards > * Assist with writing and editing as requested by Website and Help teams > Examples of planned projects: > * Administrators’ guide > * BASIC Programmers’ guide > * Technical writers’ / power users’ guide > > > There should be no space before or after the "/" Formatting wise, the spaces come in handy. > The words "Examples of" do not add anything, are imprecise and should be > deleted., Actually, they do add something. Without the words you have a closed group (guides, tutorials, etc.). With the words, you have a subset of a larger group yet to be defined. This gives the message that if there is a subject, not on that list, that someone would like to take on as a project, it would become part of that list. As noted, you are free to go in and make any changes yourself but don't be surprised if someone comes in after you and corrects your changes. -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: [email protected] Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/documentation/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
