The unspoken meaning of punctuation

Matt Gemmell, a prominent Mac software developer, tweeted about Scrivener's punctuated single-word Help Tags (aka Tool Tips). He provides a perspective that I haven't heard before, but I agree with.

UI writers and editors have endless debates about such practices. Many will argue that full sentences must be correctly punctuated. Others are emphatic that tool tips should almost always be sentence fragments. Scrivener is a great app, I use it myself, and after seeing this tweet I explored its many, many Help Tags. The implementation is generally very good (except for that full sentence thing in some cases), and what's going on here, I think, is the bane of Consistency. All the other Help Tags have periods and so must these, even when the tag is only being used to provide a name for an unlabeled control.

Posted: August 18, 2013 link to this item, Tweet this item, respond to this item