Mike Yearwood
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
General information
Category:
Technical writing
>>>>>Hi everybody,
>>>>>
>>>>>I have the following error message text:
>>>>>
>>>>>"Credit Limit must be a number greater or equal than 0" (this error message is shown in angularJs web form).
>>>>>
>>>>>I am a bit concerned about than 0 part. If there would not be 'equal' part, then 'than' sounds OK. But with added 'equal' I am not exactly sure about this error message.
>>>>>
>>>>>Can you please tell me if this is OK and if not, how it should be formulated?
>>>>>
>>>>>Thanks in advance.
>>>>
>>>>You're communicating with humans, not programmers.
>>>>What you really want to say to a human is that the credit limit can't be negative.
>>>>So why not just say:
>>>>
>>>>"The credit limit can't be negative"
>>>
>>>Good point. I guess this is the best.
>>
>>I disagree. Some humans do not know what negative means and error messages should be more specific, not more generic.
>
>This message will only appear if someone puts a minus sign in front of the value in question.
>To be really specific, the message could say "Minus signs are not allowed" but that sounds a bit clunky to me.
>
>It's anyone's guess whether the user will or will not know what a specific word means, but my bet would be that it's more likely that the average human (not programmer) will know what "negative" means than what >= 0 means.
"Greater than or equal to zero" is simpler vocabulary than "negative"
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