标签: user

I recently blogged about the worst oscilloscope manual of all time .. I've particularly enjoyed the feedback quoting from real-world manuals, such as "...the on-screen lathy rectangle shapes represent the front panel keys..." and "...turn the 'Universal' knob when holdoff time have been to max or min value, now the system will clew this information."   It's hard to argue with statements and instructions like this (how can you argue with something if you don’t know what it means?). And then another reader shared as follows:   I work in Switzerland and lately I've been dealing with a number of manuals/datasheets written by German companies. At first I despaired at understanding their statements and my coworkers asked me to stop my cursing, when I hit upon the secret. The trick is to read the manuals with English vocabulary but with the grammar rules of the original language! Now the sentences actually make a lot of sense. Of course, I don't speak Chinese or Japanese so most manuals still don't make sense but it's something...   In turn, this reminded me as to how different countries employ different writing styles in their English-language user manuals based on the rules of grammar associated with their native tongue.     In the case of user manuals written in English by native German speakers, for example, one tends to see things like "You will plug the probes into the analog inputs. Then you will set the vertical scale to the correct value. Then you will …" The reason I've put the "wills" in italics here is that recollect the emphasis in my German friends' voices when I've arrived at parties to be greeted with expressions like: "You have arrived! You will enjoy yourself!"   By comparison, I always find manuals written in English by the folks in Israel to have a very Shakespearian quality. You can almost read them like a play:   Character 1: "But where are the variables?" you ask. Character 2: "Ha! The variables are over here!" {Actor throws curtains apart to reveal the variables}   Some of the more interesting manuals I've run across in my time are those that have been created by Japanese and German companies working in concert to provide products to an English-speaking audience. The way this often works is that the native Japanese speakers in Japan create the first pass of the manual in German. Then they ship the product and the manual to their German counterparts, who proceed to translate the poor little scamp from Japanese-German into English.   How about you? Have you noticed any interesting "speech patterns" in manuals based on the grammar rules from their country of origin? Also, have you come across any multi-step translations like the "Japanese German English" path I discussed above?

PR and marketing groups at oscilloscope manufacturers around the globe seeing the title to this column must be thinking, "Please, please, please, let this be about our competitors and not us."   Well, if you happen to be a member of one of those PR or marketing teams, you can settle down and relax. I'm talking about a hypothetical oscilloscope user manual.   Do you recall the classic line "It was a dark and stormy night," made famous by the Peanuts cartoon character, Snoopy? As fate would have it, this actually was the opening sentence to an 1830 book by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton. A legend in his own lunchtime, Bulwer-Lytton became renowned for penning exceptionally bad prose. The opening sentence to his book Paul Clifford set the standard for others to follow.   "It was a dark and stormy night" is now generally understood to represent an extravagantly florid style with redundancies and run-on sentences. In fact, the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest was formed in 1982 to celebrate the worst extremes of this general style of writing. Contestants write a single sentence representing the worst-possible (though grammatically correct) opening sentence for a novel. Actually, I submitted the following entry for the 2008 competition.   As the hours passed, the expressions on the partygoers' faces became increasingly bemused and bewildered as my mother -- having grabbed the conversational reins with gusto and abandon using one of her classic opening gambits of "I bumped into Mrs. Forteskew-Smythe at the fishmongers the other day..." -- proceeded to inundate the gathered throng with a myriad of seemingly innocuous and unrelated details "...you remember, she was the oldest of three sisters; the youngest, Beryl, was a slut, while the middle girl eloped with a transsexual Australian taxidermist and they had two sons who couldn't bring themselves to touch any form of fruit, and..." and I could see the question forming in everyone's minds: "Can she possibly tie all of these tidbits of trivia together and somehow bring this tortuous tale to a meaningful close?"... and I cowered against the wall wearing a tight, grim smile because I knew, to my cost, that she could.   Sad to relate, I never heard anything back from the contest organizers, apart from a brief email message informing me that I could be assured that my offering would be "given the consideration it deserves." Maybe they are still mulling it over.   But I digress. All this was brought to my mind recently as I was skimming through a user manual for a piece of old electronic equipment. (No, I'm not going to tell you which one.) It wasn't long before I started to wonder if I had mistakenly gotten hold of an entry to a Bulwer-Lytton-esque competition for the worst user manual of all time.   This led me to start ruminating about possible opening sentences for a user manual. I started bouncing ideas for the worst oscilloscope user manual of all time. But before I bore delight you with my meandering musings, I'd really like to hear what you have to say. Remember that this has to be a single sentence that sets the stage for the horrors to come. Do you have any suggestions?