Call for review - chat and social networking section

[Phil Bull]

Hi Jeremy,

On Mon, 2011-04-25 at 18:58 -0400, Jeremy Bicha wrote:
> On 25 April 2011 18:43, Jim Campbell <jwcampbell at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I liked how you used, "what's this?" to link to a possibly-unfamiliar term.
> > What do other people think about this? We don't normally use contractions,
> > but I feel ok with using one in those cases.
[...]
> The Gnome Documentation Style Guide says "no contractions", apparently
> because they were believed to be more difficult to understand and
> translate. But the guide was not updated yet for Gnome 3 and the Gnome
> 3 Help is full of contractions.

> We want the docs to be professional but also casual and readable to
> end-users. I think using contractions help us meet that goal. Also I
> don't think we want to eliminate all the contractions from our Help if
> Gnome 3 won't.

The GNOME Documentation Style Guide is massively outdated and we don't
use most of its recommendations any more. The GNOME 3 help is full of
contractions by design - as you point out, contractions are important in
defining a more casual tone. The old GNOME help (and, in my opinion, a
lot of other end user help) suffers from being overly formal, so we've
tried to address this in the new help.

Having spoken (briefly) with translators about this issue, I don't
believe there are any problems with using contractions - they typically
have a good enough command of English to be able to deal with them
easily. (And I trust the translators, they're superhuman!)

In summary, don't worry about contractions. Write in such a manner that
the tone is professional but casual; "restrained informality". Given
this, there will be situations where contractions are suitable and
situations where they aren't.

Thanks,

Phil