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From: Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com>
To: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>, Sean Whitton <spwhitton@spwhitton.name>
Cc: "acm@muc.de" <acm@muc.de>, "emacs-devel@gnu.org" <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
Subject: RE: [External] : Re: emacs-30 baaf97ce1a1: ; Fix some ungrammatical uses of "allows to"
Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2024 23:22:28 +0000	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <DS7PR10MB52324F79337F47561D33F291F3972@DS7PR10MB5232.namprd10.prod.outlook.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <86bk19eryz.fsf@gnu.org>

> > Anyway, it does indeed mark out writing as coming from a non-native
> > user of English.  You see it relatively commonly in software contexts,
> > probably because lots of programmers are not native English speakers.
> 
> In technical texts these uses of "allows" omit "one" or "you", so the
> text really says "SOMETHING allows _you_ to do whatever", but omits
> "you".  Changing this mechanically to "allows doing" in many cases
> makes the text much harder to read, a mouthful, really.

Even better is to change it to "lets you do whatever".

Or "If SOMETHING then you can do whatever", which
makes the _user_ the actor of the active voice.




  parent reply	other threads:[~2024-08-30 23:22 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 22+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2024-08-30 17:40 emacs-30 baaf97ce1a1: ; Fix some ungrammatical uses of "allows to" Eli Zaretskii
2024-08-30 18:14 ` Alan Mackenzie
2024-08-30 19:00   ` Eli Zaretskii
2024-08-30 21:09     ` Sean Whitton
2024-08-30 19:03   ` Sean Whitton
2024-08-30 19:22     ` Eli Zaretskii
2024-08-30 21:07       ` Sean Whitton
2024-08-30 23:22       ` Drew Adams [this message]
2024-08-31  0:23     ` Po Lu
2024-08-31  6:26       ` Sean Whitton
2024-08-31  6:49         ` Gerd Möllmann
2024-08-30 19:00 ` Sean Whitton
2024-08-30 19:18   ` Eli Zaretskii
2024-08-30 21:00     ` Sean Whitton
2024-08-30 21:15       ` Ship Mints
2024-08-30 23:39       ` Mike Kupfer
2024-08-31  6:15         ` Sean Whitton
2024-08-31  6:54           ` Eli Zaretskii
2024-08-31 14:54             ` Mike Kupfer
2024-08-31  6:44       ` Eli Zaretskii
2024-09-01 10:20         ` Sean Whitton
2024-09-01 10:37           ` Eli Zaretskii

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