After spending the last several days doing markup on a syntactically and grammatically, er, "challenged" tutorial, I found myself in need of the solace of Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style," if only to remind myself that good writing does indeed exist outside my imagination. I noticed during my Web search that EoS was released some years ago into the public domain, and can be found in a variety of formats, although DocBook XML was not one of these as far as I can tell. I realize that "public domain" != "FDL," and therefore am wondering if anyone out there has sufficient expertise to address the extent to which EoS might be included in the documentation-guide. It would be a handy reference for contributors, so they might acquaint themselves with the way to write concisely before beginning a tutorial from scratch. It also would help editors (myself included) to make the right changes when presented with documentation that has been tortured and abused before a handoff. :-) In addition, or as an alternative, to EoS, perhaps there should be some guidelines that have been useful to the Red Hat staff in preparing their official RHL and RHEL documentation over the years. I have found those guides consistently clear, concise, and informative, and I would hope that FDP products would be of similar quality. By comparison, a lot of the documentation on the Web is poorly written, and often lapses into informalities, colloquialism, unhelpful jargon, and vague generalities. On the other hand, in many cases those materials will form the basis for future FDP work, so FDP content guidelines might be very useful as time goes on. (In the event that EoS can be included in the documentation-guide, I will volunteer to do markup, since I brought up the issue. I doubt it will be very difficult in any case, given that it's dominated by non-technical matter.) -- Paul W. Frields, RHCE
