: Re: Verb tense for technical document titles I'm writing a technical manual about creating database systems, and wondered what is the best verb tense for title names. My ideas are: Continuous (-ing)

@Alves689

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The choice between Continuous/Progressive form and Imperative form is one of style. Choose one form and use it consistently. In my experience, I've heard plenty of strongly held opinions about which is correct, but seen no convincing evidence that it makes any difference.

I can't back this up, but if you have a significant audience of non-native English speakers, the Imperative form might be better as it uses the more familiar form of the verb. Someone with localization experience could give you guidance on this.

Another issue to consider is context. What kind of documentation are you writing? If it's proscriptive, how-to content such as a getting started guide, the Continuous or Imperative forms will be most appropriate. In this kind of doc you're typically organizing content by task, so the task should lead the title. For example, you might have chapters/pages/sections like this:

Create a Database
Manage a Database
Delete a Database

If the content is reference material, you may want to organize by subject, so you'd do this instead:

Databases
Clusters
Load Balancing

Within the Databases chapter you'd probably have sections on creating and deleting. (Note that Load Balancing here is a gerund form, which is different from the Continuous/Progressive form.)

Looping back to the beginning, these are style issues that should be documented and followed consistently. Users are far more confused by inconsistency in style and usage than even arbitrary usage if followed consistently. So you want to choose terms and forms and then use them all the time. To many users these are all different:

Start the database
Launch the DBMS
Start a db instance.

Write down your style choices. You will forget. If you work with other people, they will need to know so your work is consistent.

If you don't want to make these decisions on your own, that's OK. Other people have been down this road before and already created style guides. Something like the AP style guide, for example, will take you a long way.

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