Which sentence expresses purpose most clearly in a code comment?
Option B is correct. "So that" introduces a purpose clause — it answers "why is this action taken?" and links the action directly to its intended goal. This is the preferred structure in code comments and documentation when explaining design rationale. "Therefore" and "as a result" express result, not purpose — they answer "what happened next?", not "why was it done?". "Consequently" signals an unintended or logical consequence, which is suitable for post-mortems, not design explanations. Use "so that" or "in order to" whenever you want to explain intent.
2 / 5
A technical spec reads: "Requests are batched __ reduce the number of round trips to the API." Which connector is correct?
Option C is correct. "In order to" introduces a purpose infinitive clause and is the formal standard in technical documentation and specifications. It is interchangeable with "to" alone (e.g., "batched to reduce…") but "in order to" is more explicit about purpose and preferred when the sentence might otherwise be ambiguous. "Therefore" and "consequently" are adverbial connectors that introduce independent clauses, not infinitive phrases — they require a full clause after them. "So" without "that" cannot precede an infinitive clause in formal writing.
3 / 5
An incident post-mortem states: "The rate limiter was not configured correctly. __ all API endpoints became overloaded within minutes." Which connector is most appropriate?
Option C is correct. "Therefore" expresses a logical result — it connects a cause (misconfiguration) to its consequence (overload). In post-mortems and incident reports, "therefore" is appropriate for presenting the causal chain of events. "So that" and "in order to" express purpose, which would imply the misconfiguration was intentional. "To" as a purpose marker also implies intent. The distinction between purpose (why you did something) and result (what happened because of it) is crucial in incident writing — conflating them can make a team look negligent.
4 / 5
Which pair correctly distinguishes purpose from result in technical documentation?
Option B is correct. Purpose answers "why" and uses "in order to / to / so that": the restart is designed to achieve the clearing. Result answers "what happened next" and uses "consequently / therefore / as a result": the restart caused the clearing as an outcome. Keeping this distinction clean matters in technical writing because purpose statements document design decisions, while result statements document observed behaviour. Mixing them makes it unclear whether a feature is working as designed or producing a side effect.
5 / 5
A developer writes: "We added pagination to the API response, __ the mobile client does not need to download the entire dataset." Should this be "so that" or "consequently"?
Option B is correct. "So that" is the right choice here because the sentence describes a deliberate design decision: pagination was added for the purpose of limiting mobile data transfer. "Consequently" would imply the reduction in downloads is an incidental result rather than the intended goal, which understates the engineering decision. In API design documentation and architecture decision records (ADRs), using purpose connectors accurately communicates that the feature exists intentionally — this matters for future maintainers evaluating whether to keep or change it.