Omitting pronouns in conditional clauses
I have a dispute with an acquaintance over this sentence:
If [you're] looking for aliases that will be displayed in the help message, see the link above.
("you're" is omitted)
I'm pretty sure this sentence is incorrect because the conditional clause has its pronoun omitted, and I couldn't find any rule such an omission would be justified by. I believe "you're" cannot be omitted without rephrasing the sentence.
My acquaintance argued this omission is acceptable in technical documentation and often used as a sort of "shortcut". He wasn't able to provide any links to dictionaries that would support his claim, I never saw such use described as acceptable, and I am not convinced by his word alone.
Who's right?
Solution 1:
Language like this can be tricky to research, but a tool like the BYU corpora can show you that this is pretty common, even outside of documentation. I searched in COCA for if *ing and manually searched through the results for these examples (which you can do too!):
But Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said Tuesday that "you will find yourself disappointed" if looking to bring in all new revenue by limiting deductions. — Obama enters 'fiscal cliff' talks calling for $1.6T in tax hikes
If using a warm water bottle or battery-powered heating pad, place it beneath the cage, not in it, to avoid harming the bird, she said. — Don’t be in the dark about pets and power outages
If looking to make an impression, the bigger the better. — The Importance of Audio Visual to a Successful Event
Solution 2:
Slightly rearranged, the sentence will look like "See the above link, if [you're] looking for aliases that will be displayed in the help message". Here, the sense doesn't change, but the first part "See the ...link..." is similar to an imperative sentence (not necessarily an order). Now, an imperative sentence usually have 'You' as the subject. E.g. Come in...= You come in; See that = you see that. Thus, in your example,
If [you're]looking for aliases that will be displayed in the help message, see the link above.,
the subject (here pronoun you) is already implied. This is what I understand.