This week I’m onsite with a client, sitting next to their existing and quite large technical authoring team. It’s fun to sit with other technical authors shooting the breeze and debating issues for the style sheet. One of the debates has got me thinking about the future of the language, and one about its past:
- Articles with extensions?
- When mentioning
.atd
files in a sentence, is it “a.atd
file” or “an.atd
file”? There didn’t seem to be a definitive source, and we found that we were divided between those who say “an Ay Tee Dee file” and don’t include the dot in the file extension, and those who say “a dot Ay Tee Dee file”. It might sound like a small discussion, but it’s one that would not have been necessary before the computer. Sooner or later, based on consensus, or diktat from one of the style manuals, this issue will pass into a formalised convention and technical communicators will have changed a small part of the grammar and style of English usage.
- Wordy Recipes
- The second discussion that came up was the consideration of the plural of “formula”. I am pleased to say that as the team was quite strongly weighted with both chemists and those with theological training, the Latin based “formulae” won out. I’m sure there are those out there who think that it doesn’t matter, or that the alternative plural endings we find on some words are tricky to teach the iTunes addled minds of the young. Yet the chemists and theologians amongst us feel compelled to go for the older ending. This was perhaps because in some ways the older variant feels like a richer source of information. Like an old bemedalled soldier on a park bench, the word seemed to lend an air of intrigue and respectability to the otherwise ordinary scene that is painted by a manual.
Andrew