Re: Contractions in the English PHP Documentation and supporting scripts/files.

I'm a book editor (Apress), and this subject often comes up. While many technical writing style guides shun the use of contractions, I think the perception of being too informal or confusing to non-native English speakers is rather outdated, and believe contractions improve readability because the lack thereof results in a somewhat robotic flow. Jason

Sean Coates wrote: Ford, Mike wrote:

On 05 July 2006 12:48, Nuno Lopes wrote:

No way!!!! We cannot start breaking translators' work. Anyway, what's the problem with contractions? When I studied English (British) I learned that contractions weren't so formal, but they aren't wrong per se. Any English native speaker correct me if I'm wrong.

As a former long-time technical editor, I'd say you're not wrong but it very much depends on context and meaning. In this case, I'd agree with the change as it shifts the emphasis of the sentence on to the very important "not", thus making it harder to misread the sentence. It's also a fairly formal definition of the return value, so a contraction is (slightly) less good on that score too.

As a current technical/copy editor, I also agree that contractions aren't (are not!) bad. In fact, I think that they add to the manual by making it more readable and they improve flow. The magazine is less formal than the manual, but they're similar in many ways, and I'm for contractions. S