Bug 166930

Summary: Typo Suggestion: Style improvement possible use second_person instead of the_user
Product: [Websites] docs.kde.org Reporter: Albert John Rogers <albertrogers>
Component: generalAssignee: Documentation Editorial Team <kde-doc-english>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED    
Severity: wishlist CC: davidbryant
Priority: NOR    
Version: unspecified   
Target Milestone: ---   
Platform: unspecified   
OS: Linux   
Latest Commit: Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Albert John Rogers 2008-07-18 16:08:37 UTC 
Version:           3.5.9 (using 3.5.9, Kubuntu (hardy) 4:3.5.9-0ubuntu7.1)
Compiler:          Target: x86_64-linux-gnu
OS:                Linux (x86_64) release 2.6.24-19-generic

Typical example:
Present wording:
If a user wishes to rename a batch of files they must....
My preferred wording:
If you wish to rename a batch of files you must... 

Why? :
English is so clumsy about gender that ignorant people think there are male and female genders. Those are sexes, not genders. Gender in English can be neuter, masculine,  feminine, or both. Your primary school teacher might say impersonal instead of both.
( In French you do not have the problem. All frogs are feminine, all cats are masculine, a quill pen is feminine but a ballpoint is masculine! So the correspondence of sex with gender is clearly not there.)

In the passage I quote, it avoids the archaic form of the singular impersonal pronoun -he- by using -they-, which fails to match the grammatical number of -the-user-.

But more to the point, if you (the help center) are telling me (the user) how to use your excellent work, I get the idea more quickly if you use the second person pronoun!

If you think this comment worthy of attention, I be willing to help work on it.


How to reproduce (or find) examples of the -problem-:
Do a grep-search for the phrase ´(the|a) user´. Perhaps better still, substitute in 
/(the|a) user (.+) (they) /you \2 you/

But of course you would need the help text file to be in one sentence per line.
Sincerely and with thanks,
Albert Rogers
Comment 1 Albert John Rogers 2008-07-18 16:34:24 UTC 
Bravo!

Pino Toscano wrote:
[bugs.kde.org quoted mail]
Comment 2 Justin Zobel 2021-03-09 05:38:53 UTC 
Thank you for the bug report.

As this report hasn't seen any changes in 5 years or more, we ask if you can please confirm that the issue still persists.

If this bug is no longer persisting or relevant please change the status to resolved.
Comment 3 David C. Bryant 2021-03-09 13:33:30 UTC 
Speaking as an English grammar maven / fussbudget, ththe second person. Other times it's in the third person. Nobody cares, so long as it's comprehensible.
Comment 4 David C. Bryant 2021-03-09 13:37:01 UTC 
My previous comment was scrambled by the software. In my judgment, this is not a bug. And all of us working on the English documentation do our best to make the documentation easy to use / understand.