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

[Martin Holmes]

I think the use of "we" is OK when it's clearly (as in the examples 
below) a reference to the authors of the Guidelines. I would be against 
its use where it might suggest (for instance) that a community of 
scholars takes a particular view, or the whole TEI community does.

So I like your formulation "choose clarity and efficiency of language 
over any particular voice," but it might be worth adding "but use the 
first person only when the referent is clearly the authors of the 
Guidelines".

Cheers,
Martin

On 12-08-06 07:11 AM, 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
>