atw: Should and would
- From: Howard Silcock <howard.silcock@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 20 Oct 2009 13:04:15 +1100
I have been reading through some of the administrative circulars here in the
Government department where I work. I was struck by how much they use
'should' and, to a lesser extent, 'would'. Typically, you find phrases like
'Staff should follow this procedure when ...' or 'I would like to remind
staff of the importance of keeping accurate records of meetings'. Why not
just write 'Follow this procedure when...' and 'Keep accurate records of
meetings', or maybe 'Remember to keep accurate records of meetings'?
I was tempted to formulate a rule "avoid 'should' and 'would' in technical
writing", but realised that there are a few cases (really very few, I'd say)
when I would [yes, I'm doing it now myself] regard it as OK. Still, I
wondered why so much is written about avoiding passives, and when not to use
the future tense, but no-one seems to point to the deadening effect of
strings of 'shoulds' and hypotheticals. Even a sentence like 'If your user
name were jsmith, your personal site's URL would be
http://mysite.com/personal/jsmith/default.aspx' probably reads better (at
least, in my view) as 'For a user name jsmith, the personal site's URL is
http://mysite.com/personal/jsmith/default.aspx '. (On the other hand, I
don't think the sentence 'Edit the information as you would in a Microsoft
Word document' needs changing.)
Does anyone know of any usage guide that addresses this topic? I looked in
'Read Me First', but couldn't see anything. And can anyone suggest other
good examples where 'would' and 'should' are OK - in other words, examples
that go against my proposed rule? Maybe I can reformulate it as a 'rule with
some exceptions' - something linguists would probably feel fine about but
which my mathematical background makes me definitely reluctant to accept!
Howard
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