Shortly before i started to work at Oracle Corporation in 1992, a palace coup occurred in the upper reaches of the Applications Documentation hierarchy, and the new regime dictated that writers insert more “you appeal” into their user manuals, the end result of which i found as ludicrous as the phrase itself.
So i issued my own proclamation, “Using Your “You Appeal” in Your Essays”.
You use your “you” and your “your” as often as possible in your essays because you want your maximum You Appeal. Your readers want you to constantly address them in your work, just as your brief paragraphs here continually address you.
You can add your You Appeal to your essays easily. First, you can recast most of your sentences to begin with “You use” or “You can.” You can further increase your You Appeal by frequently adding “your” to your text. You can usually replace “the” with “your,” and you can almost always stick “your” in front of your nouns and your noun phrases. In most of your cases, you can be confident that your meaning will not change, as you can see from your following example:
Before: Use AutoZap to purge retired transactions from the history file.
After: You use your AutoZap to purge your retired transactions from your history file.
When you use your You Appeal well, you are assured that your readers will share your pleasure in your increased friendliness of your writing.
Couldn’t find a recent pic with You Appeal for you, but here’s a Phoenix canariensis at the corner of Waller and Octavia that sure is enjoying itself.
