fsprojects-archive / zzarchive-generator-fsharp

[ARCHIVED] Yeoman F# generator
Apache License 2.0
62 stars 27 forks source link

Use lowercase second-person pronouns when appropriate #34

Closed rmunn closed 8 years ago

rmunn commented 8 years ago

The Yeoman generator currently asks questions like "What do You want to do?" and "Do You want to use Paket/FAKE?" While this capitalization would be correct in German, where Du and Sie are capitalized for politeness, this feels wrong to a native English speaker:

http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/30185/you-versus-you-as-polite-form-of-writing

I suggest changing the questions to use lowercase "you" instead of uppercase "You". (Except when the word "You" is the first word of a sentence, of course). Native English speakers won't perceive this as impolite, and they will perceive uppercase "You" as incorrect English.

Note that legalese, such as found in the Apache 2.0 license, is an exception. There, the word "You" is capitalized to indicate that it refers specifically to the person agreeing to the license, and this is defined in the license's "Definitions" section. In such text, "You" should remain capitalized; but in normal text that is presented to the user, the normal rules of English should be followed, and the word "You" should normally become "you" except at the start of a sentence.