I have this debate with myself over and over again. I'm not talking the traditional text writing, but when you write a blog title, or a tooltip for a button, or bullet points on a powerpoint presentation.
Paul Gross and had this discussion with regards to PowerPoint presentation. He strongly believes that you should *not* add periods (or semi-colon) at the end of bullet points in powerpoint. He calls it noise and a distraction. He won that argument.
But what about buttons and input boxes tooltip. Most of the time those a very short phrases, like "Bold", or "Align left", so it is easy to say that you leave the period off. But what about when you have a long phrase, like "Click to increase the text editor area". That almost begs for a period
Hi Marcelo, I have a precise opinion on the punctuation (pun-ctuation intended) use: IMHO is not about phrase length, is about where the phrase is located.
Period is intended to end a phrase, so if you have "Click to increase the text editor area" in a step by step instruction list, this requires a period.
But if you have a button (or a tooltip): "Click here to increase the text editor area", the period is redundant because you add a logical border (the period) to the physical border (the button or the tooltip edge).
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Comments (1) for "Punctuation wars"
- 3/16/2007 6:09 AM
October, 2007