Il 17/10/2014 12:52, Reinier Olislagers ha scritto:
On 17/10/2014 12:50, Giuliano Colla wrote:
Il 17/10/2014 12:21, Reinier Olislagers ha scritto:
On 17/10/2014 12:16, Mattias Gaertner wrote:
On Fri, 17 Oct 2014 11:58:21 +0200
Reinier Olislagers <[email protected]> wrote:
Googling gives lot of pages saying that cannot is more formal than
can't. And MS Word prefers cannot over can not.
This means: It depends on the target audience of your application.
Yes, formal versus informal is part of it. Another part is
comprehension, e.g.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb226825%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
"Avoid contractions in technical messages. They can slow down
comprehension."
In my experience Microsoft should be taken as a guideline of what *not*
to do.
The inventors of the well known dialog: Abort, Retry, Ignore should not
have voice on what is user friendly and what's not.
I disagree. The link I posted shows sensible advice.
If you have better references, as I said, I'm very interested!
Once said that "can't" is less formal, and therefore preferable in a
short message window, which is more akin to spoken language than to
formal written language, I can only testify my personal experience.
In many decades of activity I've been in touch with field engineers,
sales people etc. from a lot of countries. The vast majority of them
weren't (were not;-) ) native English speakers, and some of them had a
lot of pain in writing a simple English sentence. But it never occurred
to me a single misunderstanding because of a "can't" not understood or
misinterpreted. Being "can't" very frequent in my e-mails (they usually
ask for features which either can't be done for free, or can't be done
at all), I draw from my direct experience the conclusion that "can't"
does not possibly "slow down comprehension" as Microsoft geniuses claim.
Giuliano
--
Giuliano Colla
Project planning question: when it's 90% done, are we halfway or not yet?
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