--- Richard Fateman <fateman@cs.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> I think that the manual talking about the user in the third person
> is probably bad.
Actually, rather making the user the subject of sentences, I'm
inclined to talk about the function (or whatever) of interest.
E.g., "``integrate'' does this, that, and the other" instead of
"You can use the ``integrate'' function to do such and such".
I've made some changes of this kind, but I came to this after
beginning to revise the documentation so this point of view
is not consistently applied.
The two examples of online documentation that I consider
exemplary, Unix man pages and the R online help system,
largely avoid talking about the user, and use third person
when they do, if I'm not mistaken.
At this point it would probably help focus the discussion if
persons wishing to suggest alternative phrasings would find
specific examples in the CVS texinfo files.
For what it's worth,
Robert Dodier
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