Writing & Grammar: Stylistic Conventions

by Jennie Ruby 

Many words in the computer training industry have different stylistic conventions depending on your office preference or on the style guide you use. In this challenge, indicate your preferred treatment of these terms (you can post your answers as comments below):

email/e-mail

e-learning/e-Learning/E-Learning/ eLearning

m-learning/mLearning

website/Web site

Web page/web page

computer-based training/eLearning/asynchronous training using technology

the internet/the Internet (actually, most of the industry does capitalize that one)

HTML/html

Answers to Last Week's Mouse Move Challenge

Answers this week are brought to you by Tara Aukerman. Additional responses after the slash marks are provided by Clay Walnum and Ann Whitfield. Jane Edwards also adds this mouse move, which you can use for putting a folder or file name into editing mode: Southern double-click: Click once, pause, then slowly click again.

1. Press and release the left mouse button 
   -- Click
2. Press and release the right mouse button 
   -- Right-click
3. Roll the wheel on top of the mouse 
   -- Scroll (up/down - never just "scroll to")/Use the mouse wheel
4. Quickly press and release the mouse button twice 
   -- Double-click
5. Quickly press and release the mouse button three times 
   -- Triple-click (but since this is uncommon, a parenthetical note like: "Click three times quickly")
6. Hold the mouse button down and move it from one point to another 
   -- Click and drag (or just drag)
7. Put the mouse pointer over an item but do not click 
   -- Roll over (for non-computer-saavy folks) or Hover (for computer saavy folks)/Rest the mouse pointer
8. Drag the mouse across text so that the text background changes color and you can then format or delete that text 
   -- Select (because often users will double-click to highlight a word or triple-click to highlight a sentence) or Highlight
9. Use the highlighter tool to color the background of text
   -- Select the text and click 
10. Hold down the shift button and click the left mouse button 
    --Press and hold the SHIFT key and click on XYZ (not a common problem for our audience so we've learned that anything else isn't specific enough)./SHIFT-click

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Looking for help with your writing technique? Jennie teaches two writing classes: Writing Effective eLearning Voiceover Scripts and eLearning: Writing Effective Scripts.

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Comments

[Nick Shears]

email

e-learning (It's clearer until the term is in common use, when the hyphen will doubtless disappear)

m-learning (As for e-learning: the hyphen will wither in time)

website

Web page/web page: Neither; I've been using "webpage" for some time now.

eLearning (If that's the only alternative to the over-wordy version)

the internet (I gave up caitalising it a when I realised my voice was becoming increaingly lonely)

HTML (probably for a while yet)

[nicu]

e-mail
eLearning
mLearning
website
web page
eLearning
the internet
HTML