On disregarding the use of the word "not"
I've been doing a lot of patent application reviewing/editing of late. It's an unavoidable occupational hazard of being paid to invent things.
Patents are written in a language other than English. Particularly annoying this week is our in-house attorney's insistence that we exclude certain words such as "not" and "no". I believe this is just a preference rather than a legal requirement -- this attorney wants us to use "can" where our previous attorney wanted us to use "may" -- but I and the outsourcing attorney are stuck with it.
Although easier than writing a patent application without the letter "e", this is still surprisingly hard and leads to very odd sounding English like this post's subject. Some cases are easy like "does not include" becoming "excludes", but others take more thought. For example, consider "Do not power cycle the time machine while in operation". The best "not"-excluding alternative I can think of is "Power cycling the time machine while in operation is extremely dangerous".
(Alas, my work centers around things other than time machines.)
Patents are written in a language other than English. Particularly annoying this week is our in-house attorney's insistence that we exclude certain words such as "not" and "no". I believe this is just a preference rather than a legal requirement -- this attorney wants us to use "can" where our previous attorney wanted us to use "may" -- but I and the outsourcing attorney are stuck with it.
Although easier than writing a patent application without the letter "e", this is still surprisingly hard and leads to very odd sounding English like this post's subject. Some cases are easy like "does not include" becoming "excludes", but others take more thought. For example, consider "Do not power cycle the time machine while in operation". The best "not"-excluding alternative I can think of is "Power cycling the time machine while in operation is extremely dangerous".
(Alas, my work centers around things other than time machines.)