Miscellanea

When ‘you’ turns a good training session bad

Now it’s time to train the trainers: for the mental well-being of your audience, take the time to differentiate between the second person singular pronoun and second person plural pronoun. Otherwise, “you” is going to trip you up every time.

Is there a difference between “you” (singular) and “you” (plural)? Yes. The most common usage in a training scenario is that “you” (singular) refers to the end-user and “you” (plural) refers to the institution (represented by the system administrators).

You can easily change the field-labels to meet your needs.

Can the end-user change those field-labels and each different user can have their own customized field-labels, or is that a function that the institution (again, read “system administrator”) can change to meet institution-wide needs? These are vastly different usage scenarios.

Your institution can easily change the field-labels to meet your needs.

While marginally more verbose, this clearly and effectively communicates the point. Novice users will remember “If I need a label changed, I can contact the system administrator,” instead of “Drat, how did he get into the dialog to change those labels again?”

Training is about transferring knowledge – and the best way to do that is through clear communication. It’s a pity that, on occasion, our own language is the very thing that hinders that from happening.

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