Because I write for a living, I have an opinion about how to make that text better. Using a few minutes of my morning, this is how I would write that text:
Provide your actual billed usage as a result of your household consumption. You can also view the correlation between changes in usage at your residence or business based upon the following factors:
- time of day
- temperature fluctuation
- the installation or removal of equipment
Here's my thought process. In the first sentence, I would not repeat the name of the screen. I would have a heading above the first sentence, which this help text does not have. I would do that because it would make it easier to single-source this content with RoboHelp so that I could generate a PDF - whether that is a requirement or not is unknown.
Then I would structure the first sentence to complete the sentence "The purpose of this screen is to" which makes this the first sentence: [The purpose of this screen is to] Provide your actual billed usage as a result of your household consumption. Yes, certainly you can do two things on this screen, but I would choose one as the most important - "Provide your actual billed usage as a result of your household consumption" - and make the text about the correlation be the second sentence. I also moved the "location" (residence or business) to the beginning of the sentence to avoid additional layers in the content. The word "factors" is a first draft - I would consider "based upon the following" instead because "factors" isn't really important as a description of the bullet list.
Again, this was a first draft / first crack - subsequent revisions would likely follow.
No comments:
Post a Comment