Style faux pas

The study of good style guides, such as the Tidbits Style Guide increases the sensitivity to poor style. Today I saw one of my personal pet peeves.

In a document there was a sentence saying that software "runs on Windows 2000 and Windows XP personal computers." There is no such thing. Windows (of whatever flavor) is an operating system made by Microsoft. They don't make PC's. If one needed to keep the personal computer in the sentence (though there is no reason to do so) it could be made into "runs on a personal computer running Windows 2000 or Windows XP." However simply removing personal computers removes excess verbiage.

Category: