UI Text Guidelines about contractions [#1175462]

I have a question regarding the use of contractions in UI screen text, such as "Don't" vs "Do not" and "Can't" vs "Cannot". I cannot find a definitive guide regarding this for Drupal in the UI screen text guidelines (http://drupal.org/node/501452 and http://drupal.org/node/604342). The source code of Drupal also does not provide a consistent answer as both variants are used (although the full versions seem to be used more often).

My gut feeling says that the non-contracted versions are more formal and more in-line with the overall style of the Drupal UI text, but I'm not sure. Are there guidelines regarding the use of such contractions in Drupal UI text? Perhaps they have to be put in the documentation?

From two related references: the KDE HIGs state to avoid them (http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Usability/HIG/Contractions), the Windows Guidelines (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&Family...) says to use them "as appropriate and in context" (page 322).

Comments

Comment #1

arianek commented 2 June 2011 at 04:53

Issue tags:

+style guide

I definitely don't take a hard line on this - if it's not too slangy, I think that contractions are appropriate. We do not want to have to write extra formally just because it is an arbitrary rule we have defined. ;) I just skimmed http://drupal.org/style-guide/content as well and didn't see anything explicit.

Will ask for feedback from others for consensus, then it should probably be added to one of the guides.

Comment #2

silverwing commented 2 June 2011 at 19:27

Nothing about the style guide suggests formality. It even says "Use ordinary, everyday language instead of words that sound more elevated--they usually don't." And even the style guide has a number of contractions in it!

But I'm a native English speaker, so contractions don't (errr, do not) bother me.

Comment #3

haffmans commented 6 June 2011 at 10:52

To what extent does the Drupal.org content style guide also apply to user interfaces (which is what my original question is about)? A link to the style guide should probably be placed in the UI best practices page (http://drupal.org/node/501452, under Screen Text) so it's easier to find for module developers, assuming the style guide is applicable...

Perhaps an additional interesting point to consider is bullet 2 of http://drupal.org/coding-standards#quotes (escaping quotes). If you combine HTML with attributes (which should use double quotes for valid HTML) in a translatable string, as well as a contraction, you end up having to escape one of them. It might be useful to get some extra opinions/thoughts from people with better knowledge of the technical (and localization) implications when using contractions in such edge cases?

In any other case I suppose using contractions (or not) is really up to the module author (i.e. using MS's "as appropriate and in context" guideline)?