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Hey Michael, I'm the author of that terrible document. On Tue, May 04, 2010 at 08:32:36AM -0500, Michael Saunders wrote:
No, it's plain English. Unfamiliar phrases are just one consequence of a language becoming the world standard. Do you want to flame Italians or French for not adhering to the norms of classical Latin? You don't. There's no point at all in even mentioning somebody's stylistic idiosyncrasies on the internets. Just face it: the world won't adopt English as a global means of communication without interfering with its norms. If you don't understand something why don't you contact the author, his email adress is right there on the first page.
I don't mind non-native speakers using bad grammar, strange usages, or odd constructions at all. �Things like that are usually no problem for native speakers to understand, although the two sentences I quoted were not "plain English" at all---one was completely indecipherable. The biggest problem with the docs is far more basic---it's the most basic mistake a beginning writer can make. �I'm sure documents like the ones I was shown on this thread make perfect sense to their authors---who already know what they mean---but they fail to communicate their message to anyone who doesn't already know it. �The reader isn't being given enough information to decode the message and what he is given is in no particular order: �it's whatever bits and pieces of the story the author thinks of in the order he happens to think of them.
I'm sorry for my writing and the inconvenience it brings. However right now I cannot do anything about it. May be I will rewrite it in the summer.
You can't tell the author this. �It makes sense to him and he can't understand the criticism. �He has to put himself in the place of the reader who doesn't already know the message. �If he can't do that, he can't communicate. �I'm sure that these documents would be just as bad in the native languages of the authors as they are in English. �The fault is far deeper than bad translation.
Actually I do understand your feeling. Like I said, I may rewrite most part of it in the summer. And BTW, that document is *supposed* to be an extraction of some particular pieces of info in the official doc. Because I find the official doc too heavy for both my PDF viewer and me. And about the background, I just grabbed some random Asymptote file of mine. Though I find it pretty much ok, I may change that also in the future. Let's focus on the tooltip and external database issue you encountered, instead of discuss that document and my bad writing :-). -- There is no emotion; there is peace. There is no ignorance; there is knowledge. There is no passion; there is serenity. There is no death; there is the Force.