"Exercises are some of the most difficult parts of a book to write. Since an exercise
has very little context, ambiguity can be especially deadly; a bit of carefully chosen
redundancy can be especially important. For this reason, exercises are also the
hardest technical writing to translate to other languages."
"Sentences like "And now you should ENTER the data" do nothing to help the user relax - the capitals
look too much like DANGER SIGNS."
"Don's wife commented that one thing she always needs to know is "How do I get out of
a mess if I do something wrong?" Don said that this is something manuals almost never
explain - perhaps it never occurs to their authors that somebody will eventually want to
stop playing with their program. The solution we were looking at did have a one-line
description of how to EXIT, but Don said even this is jargon."
Mathematical Writing
by
Donald E. Knuth, Tracy Larrabee, and Paul M. Roberts