The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #96336   Message #1883051
Posted By: Les from Hull
11-Nov-06 - 09:08 AM
Thread Name: BS: Tech US to UK English advice please
Subject: RE: BS: Tech US to UK English advice please
Part of the problem is that language is constantly changing. And under the careful attention of Microsoft, it's probably changing faster than some of us like.

For instance, I would always use the -ise rather than -ize, but other changes from what I was taught at school I can readily accept. To casually split an infinitive is no problem to me, neither do I bother what I end a sentance with. The way that compound nouns start with two words, gain a hyphen and then end up as one word travels at different speeds for different people.

So it's not just UK Technical English. It's UK Technical English to suit a particular group. The best advice I could give would be to allow feedback so that anyone who is really bothered about what they read can contact you. But in my experience people with 'technical' somewhere in their job specification are slightly less worried about the style of what they read than others. I had the job of teaching some of these people how to write in plain English, and it seemed that not many of them were really that bothered.