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

[Piotr Banski]

Hi Becky,

Firstly, I would have nothing against if all four examples that you cite 
were expressed in the passive, maybe sometimes just by the participle 
(", called a module,") rather that copula+participle.

Secondly, I would still rather choose the third option that you mention, 
i.e., clarity, maybe even without mentioning "particular voice". Our 
contributor base is rather varied, and imposing on them a stiff 
stylistic/grammatical constraint beyond clarity could lead to 
difficulties in both encoding and decoding, so to say. Let's keep it 
simple at the stage of creation/contribution, and possibly smooth it out 
later, if really necessary.

Best,

   Piotr

On 06/08/12 16:11, Rebecca Welzenbach wrote:
> 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
>