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Re: Rewrite manual intro to be gender-neutral.


From: Bob Friesenhahn
Subject: Re: Rewrite manual intro to be gender-neutral.
Date: Sun, 6 Jun 2010 14:02:40 -0500 (CDT)
User-agent: Alpine 2.01 (GSO 1266 2009-07-14)

On Sun, 6 Jun 2010, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:

I'm really confused now.  Is there any specific formulation, sentence,
or something in the manual that my change made worse in any way?  If you
think so, can you please point it out precisely, including a suggestion
on how to improve it?  Your comment seems very general, and while I can
guess that in general, the transformation from third to second person
singular can be problematic, I fail to see why this should be the case
in this patch.

It seems to me that the term 'you' is first person in the context of the person doing the reading.

In all autotools manuals, use of "you" is already abundant.

I can't help that.

The problem with trying to be sexually agnostic is that the english language was never designed for it. Until very recent times, it was accepted that 'he' also meant 'she' unless specifically mentioned otherwise. ('she' becomes subordinate to 'he' due to the biblical story of how woman was created from Adam's rib). The result becomes clumsy text.

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/



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