Index: head/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/fdp-primer/writing-style/chapter.xml =================================================================== --- head/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/fdp-primer/writing-style/chapter.xml (revision 42005) +++ head/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/fdp-primer/writing-style/chapter.xml (revision 42006) @@ -1,560 +1,570 @@ Writing Style Tips Technical documentation can be improved by consistent use of several principes. Most of these can be classified into three goals: be clear, be complete, and be concise. These goals can conflict with each other. Good writing consists of a balance between them. Be Clear Clarity is extremely important. The reader may be a novice, or reading the document in a second language. Strive for simple, uncomplicated text that clearly explains the concepts. Avoid flowery or embellished speech, jokes, or colloquial expressions. Write as simply and clearly as possible. Simple text is easier to understand and translate. Keep explanations as short, simple, and clear as possible. Avoid empty phrases like in order to, which usually just means to. Avoid potentially patronizing words like basically. Avoid Latin terms like i.e. or cf., which may be unknown outside of academic or scientific groups. Write in a formal style. Avoid addressing the reader as you. For example, say copy the file to /tmp rather than you can copy the file to /tmp. + Give clear, correct examples. A trivial example is better + than no example, but a good example is better yet. Do not + give bad examples, identifiable by apologies or sentences like + but really it should never be done that way. + Bad examples are worse than no examples. Give good examples, + because even when warned not to use the example + as shown, the reader will usually just use the + example as shown. + Avoid weasel words like should, might, try, or could. These words imply that the speaker is unsure of the facts, and create doubt in the reader. Similarly, give instructions as imperative commands: not you should do this, but merely do this. Be Complete Do not make assumptions about the reader's abilities or skill level. Tell them what they need to know. Give links to other documents to provide background information without having to recreate it. Put yourself in the reader's place, - and answer the questions they will ask. + anticipate the questions they will ask, and answer + them. Be Concise While features should be documented completely, sometimes there is so much information that the reader cannot easily find the specific detail needed. The balance between being complete and being concise is a challenge. One approach is to have an introduction, then a quick start section that describes the most common situation, followed by an in-depth reference section. Guidelines To promote consistency between the myriad authors of the FreeBSD documentation, some guidelines have been drawn up for authors to follow. Use American English Spelling There are several variants of English, with different spellings for the same word. Where spellings differ, use the American English variant. color, not colour, rationalize, not rationalise, and so on. The use of British English may be accepted in the case of a contributed article, however the spelling must be consistent within the whole document. The other documents such as books, web site, manual pages, etc. will have to use American English. Do not use contractions Do not use contractions. Always spell the phrase out in full. Don't use contractions would be wrong. Avoiding contractions makes for a more formal tone, is more precise, and is slightly easier for translators. Use the serial comma In a list of items within a paragraph, separate each item from the others with a comma. Separate the last item from the others with a comma and the word and. For example, look at the following:
This is a list of one, two and three items.
Is this a list of three items, one, two, and three, or a list of two items, one and two and three? It is better to be explicit and include a serial comma:
This is a list of one, two, and three items.
Avoid redundant phrases Try not to use redundant phrases. In particular, the command, the file, and man command are probably redundant. These two examples show this for commands. The second example is preferred. Use the command svn to update your sources. Use svn to update your sources. These two examples show this for filenames. The second example is preferred. … in the filename /etc/rc.local… … in /etc/rc.local… These two examples show this for manual references. The second example is preferred (the second example uses citerefentry). See man csh for more information. See &man.csh.1;. Two spaces at the end of sentences Always use two spaces at the end of sentences, as this improves readability, and eases use of tools such as Emacs. While it may be argued that a capital letter following a period denotes a new sentence, this is not the case, especially in name usage. Jordan K. Hubbard is a good example; it has a capital H following a period and a space, and there certainly is not a new sentence there. For more information about writing style, see Elements of Style, by William Strunk. Style Guide To keep the source for the documentation consistent when many different people are editing it, please follow these style conventions. Letter Case Tags are entered in lower case, para, not PARA. Text that appears in SGML contexts is generally written in upper case, <!ENTITY…>, and <!DOCTYPE…>, not <!entity…> and <!doctype…>. Acronyms Acronyms should generally be spelled out the first time they appear in a document, as in: Network Time Protocol (NTP). After the acronym has been defined, you should generally use the acronym only (not the whole term, unless it makes more sense contextually to use the whole term). Usually, acronyms are defined only one per document. But if you prefer, you can also define them the first time they appear in each chapter. All acronyms should be enclosed in acronym tags, with a role attribute with the full term defined. This allows a link to the glossary to be created, and for mouseovers to be rendered with the fully expanded term. Indentation Each file starts with indentation set at column 0, regardless of the indentation level of the file which might contain this one. Opening tags increase the indentation level by 2 spaces. Closing tags decrease the indentation level by 2 spaces. Blocks of 8 spaces at the start of a line should be replaced with a tab. Do not use spaces in front of tabs, and do not add extraneous whitespace at the end of a line. Content within elements should be indented by two spaces if the content runs over more than one line. For example, the source for this section looks something like: ... ... Indentation Each file starts with indentation set at column 0, regardless of the indentation level of the file which might contain this one. ... ]]> If you use Emacs or XEmacs to edit the files then sgml-mode should be loaded automatically, and the Emacs local variables at the bottom of each file should enforce these styles. Vim users might want to configure their editor with: augroup sgmledit autocmd FileType sgml set formatoptions=cq2l " Special formatting options autocmd FileType sgml set textwidth=70 " Wrap lines at 70 columns autocmd FileType sgml set shiftwidth=2 " Automatically indent autocmd FileType sgml set softtabstop=2 " Tab key indents 2 spaces autocmd FileType sgml set tabstop=8 " Replace 8 spaces with a tab autocmd FileType sgml set autoindent " Automatic indentation augroup END Tag Style Tag Spacing Tags that start at the same indent as a previous tag should be separated by a blank line, and those that are not at the same indent as a previous tag should not: NIS October 1999 ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ]]> Separating Tags Tags like itemizedlist which will always have further tags inside them, and in fact do not take character data themselves, are always on a line by themselves. Tags like para and term do not need other tags to contain normal character data, and their contents begin immediately after the tag, on the same line. The same applies to when these two types of tags close. This leads to an obvious problem when mixing these tags. When a starting tag which cannot contain character data directly follows a tag of the type that requires other tags within it to use character data, they are on separate lines. The second tag should be properly indented. When a tag which can contain character data closes directly after a tag which cannot contain character data closes, they co-exist on the same line. White Space Changes When committing changes, do not commit changes to the content at the same time as changes to the formatting. This is so that the teams that convert the documentation to other languages can quickly see what content has actually changed in your commit, without having to decide whether a line has changed because of the content, or just because it has been refilled. For example, if you have added two sentences to a paragraph, such that the line lengths on the paragraph now go over 80 columns, first commit your change with the too-long line lengths. Then fix the line wrapping, and commit this second change. In the commit message for the second change, be sure to indicate that this is a whitespace-only change, and that the translation team can ignore it. Non-Breaking Space Avoid line breaks in places where they look ugly or make it difficult to follow a sentence. Line breaks depend on the width of the chosen output medium. In particular, viewing the HTML documentation with a text browser can lead to badly formatted paragraphs like the next one: Data capacity ranges from 40 MB to 15 GB. Hardware compression … The general entity &nbsp; prohibits line breaks between parts belonging together. Use non-breaking spaces in the following places: between numbers and units: between program names and version numbers: between multiword names (use with caution when applying this to more than 3-4 word names like The FreeBSD Brazilian Portuguese Documentation Project): Word List This list of words shows the correct spelling and capitalization when used in FreeBSD Documentation. If a word is not on this list, ask about it on the &a.doc;. Word XML Code CD-ROM <acronym>CD-ROM</acronym> DoS (Denial of Service) <acronym>DoS</acronym> email file system IPsec Internet manual page mail server name server Ports Collection Ports&nbsp;Collection read-only Soft Updates &unix; &unix; web server