Re: revised the press release

[Calum Benson <calum benson oracle com>]

On 22 Mar 2013, at 05:39, Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me> wrote:

> Here is the revised press release.  I'd like more eyeballs on it if possible.  Karen and I spent a little 
> time on it tonight as we said we would.
>
> http://piratepad.net/j4B5vOQBep

My initial reaction is that if I didn't already know what GNOME was, I'd probably have stopped reading by the 
time I got to the quote in the fifth paragraph that gave me any clues :) (Yes, I know there's an obligatory 
"About GNOME" section at the bottom, but people still tend to read press releases from top to bottom.)

The all-important first paragraph, in particular, seems particularly light on useful details:

"GNOME 3.8, the latest update of the free software project which continues to refine and redefine the concept 
of the user experience."

So I can tell it's a free software project, which is good :) But "the concept of the user experience" doesn't 
really tell me anything. "User experience" is only meaningful in the context of particular people doing 
particular things, but there's no mention here of who those people might be or what they might be doing. (And 
would I really care about the "concept" of the user experience, rather than just the *actual* user 
experience?)

Couple of other random observations:

- Typo: "Every Details Matter" should be "Every Detail Matters"

- "approximately 1,112 people": that's not really an approximation :) It should be "1,112 people", or 
"approximately 1100 people", or "over 1100 people".

- I know Stefano is not a native English speaker, but his quote is grammatically incorrect -- it should be 
"for many years", not "since many years". I don't know if the marketing team has any guidelines about if/when 
it's acceptable to make grammatical corrections to direct quotes, but you might consider it… in a formal 
press release, any poor grammar might seem a bit unprofessional.

--Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON                        Interaction Designer
+353 1 803 3807                     Systems Experience Design
http://blogs.oracle.com/calum       Oracle EMEA Ltd., Ireland