User instructions
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As a result of this, this forum is now closed.
The English dictionary community team would like the opportunity to say a huge thanks to all of you who participated by posting questions and helping other community members.
We hope this forum was useful, and that you enjoyed being a part of it.
If you would like to get in touch with any OED-related queries, please write to
[email protected]
And if you would like to contribute suggestions to the OED, please do so by visiting: https://public.oed.com/contribute-to-the-oed/
Thank you very much indeed, and good bye!
The community team
User instructions
For some reason, I prefer the term User instructions to User's instructions. What say you?
Actually, I guess the latter is even somewhat more ambiguous than the former, an ambiguity you do not get in combination with 'manual' or 'guide'.
Comments
Hi @norwegianblue
Oh, I agree with you - the latter does seem to be more ambiguous, at least to me!
(As there could be a situation where the instructions would be coming from the user.)
This is just a general piece about apostrophes, from our English pronunciation pages, but see if it helps:
Apostrophe (')
Thank you, @Simone
Hi @norwegianblue,
I cannot recall seeing too many possessive apostrophes in such situations. Thinking about it, you are referring to instructions for a user rather than instructions belonging to a user. Obviously, it will often be the case that both of those descriptions apply but the critical relationship the label needs to describe is the for.
And yet in educational publishing, books for different participants are called Teacher's Book and Student's Book.