verbsword-choice
I am trying to write a technical document, and I've been scratching my hair out, since I need to explain things with formal proper technical English, here is my question:
Does
System shall enforce customer to take a ticket to enter the highway.
sound correct to you? Or should I go with "System shall force/compel/oblige customer to take a ticket"? Which one sounds more suitable to you?
It is force of habit, and course of action.
The Corpus of Contemporary American and the British National Corpus reports the following data about force of habit (the reported values are the frequencies per million).
Ensure and enforce are indeed similar in that they are both transitive (i.e. they take a direct object), but not all transitive verbs are equal. Enforce only takes a noun or noun phrase (such as the rules) as its direct object, while ensure is more versatile (from a grammatical standpoint): while it can take a noun or noun phrase, it can also take a content clause (also called complement clause or that-clause; such as that the rules are followed) as its object. This has been established by usage and convention, and it is rare to see enforce paired with that. In this case, convention dictates the grammatical constraints, and therefore it is grammatically incorrect to use a that-clause as the object of certain verbs (such as enforce). Ngrams shows relative usages:
As you mention, you could replace enforce with ensure:
People then create laws to ensure that these regulations are being followed.
Or, if you want to keep the strength of enforce, you would need to change the direct object from a content clause to a noun phrase:
People then create laws to enforce these regulations.
Best Answer
I agree with John Lawler. "System shall require customer to take a ticket first in order to enter the highway, and shall not allow customer to enter the highway without taking a ticket first." That is fairly typical specification language.
For those of you not familiar with specification language, typically you use shall to express something mandatory and may to express something that is optional. Using will (as you more likely would in common speech) can be confusing because the fact that something will do something in the future does not clarify whether it is required or optional.