[tei-council] Third-person vs. First-person in the Guidelines

[Rebecca Welzenbach]

Hi all,

I'm putting together the first draft of our style guide, which for now
consists of the "Style Notes," "House style: notes on usage," and
"House style: preferred orthography sections of
http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/Council/Working/tcw20.xml," plus our
conclusions about hyphenation and some other bits and pieces.

While editing it occurred to me to add a note about the voice in which
the Guidelines are written. I assumed that the Guidelines were written
in the third person, but in Chapter 1 alone, I saw several instances
of "we":

* "we refer to such a document informally as an ODD document"
* "which we call a module"
* "we also say that class B is a superclass of class A"
* "We do not describe them in detail here"

Should the Style Guide address the overall voice of the Guidelines,
and if so, which of the following do you prefer?:

* First-person (in which case it may be necessary to check for
ambiguity about whether "we" refers to the editors, the Technical
Council, all TEI users, or some other group, and find a way to
document/clarify this).
* Third-person (in which case sentences currently using "we" will
probably be flipped around into the passive voice, e.g. from "which we
call a module" to "which is called a module" This annoys some readers
and writers more than others).
* Or something like "choose clarity and efficiency of language over
any particular voice"

Thanks for your input,

Becky