I Figured It Out ... and it is DUMB!

When I worked at the Unnamed Hellhole in southern Iowa, there were a lot of dumb technical writing ideas floating around. One of many that I hated following was the idea of including punctuation in a menu option when the punctuation has one meaning within a User Interface (UI) and another meaning in writing. Case in point was an option named "New..." on the File menu. Due to idiotic standards, I had to write:

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From the File menu, click New....

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STUPID! Three bold periods, followed by a non-bold period?!?

Apparently, a similar dumb idea in technical writing has floated up to the north and into Pearson. In their PearsonAccess documentation, apparently, if a field on a screen has punctuation as part of its label, you have to include that punctuation in the documentation. In this case, the * indicates it is a required field. Why it has to be included in the documentation is beyond me, but that's what I see here:

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When I initially took the screenshot, I didn't understand that including the * in the documentation was related to the field label on the screen. I searched for * on the page and couldn't find it, which led me to looking more closely at the screenshot field labels.