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CRB, page 298, under "Spell Slots": "the spells you can cast in a day are referred to as spell slots."
This wording makes me cringe. One does not refer to spells as spell slots, at least I don't, because they are two different things. I would prefer "The number of spells you can cast in a day is equal to your number of spell slots".
I suppose the majority reaction to this is going to be "who cares?" Fair enough I guess, but I care! :-)
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I used to write technical documentation. My opinion of the wording in the PF2 Core Rulebook is that the Paizo developers started with developers' notes for Pathfinder 2nd Edition written on 3-by-5 cards (or the electronic equivalent), organized them for readability, and added an Introduction. And that is why "Playing the Game" comes as late as Chapter 9.
Good documentation emphasizes the purpose of an element. Thus, I would have said on page 298, "Characters of spellcasting classes can cast a certain number of spells each day. The potential to cast a spell of a particular level is called a spell slot."
There's merits to various writing styles. Not to mention it's a several hundred page document. Honestly it doesn't seem particularly egregious to me, especially when quoted in context as that isn't even the full sentence.
Characters of spellcasting classes can cast a certain number of spells each day; the spells you can cast in a day are referred to as spell slots.
Taken in context it's rather clear that it's talking about the number of spells you can cast each day. It just doesn't repeat that in the second half of the sentence.
And then after the quoted sentence it goes on to talk more about increasing spell slots as you level and higher level spell slots.
For reference: Spell Slots
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I didn't, and don't, say it was egregious, I said it was cringeworthy. I still think so. Even taken in context with the first clause of the sentence.
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Serious question CM: Why are you insulting Ed for telling you his feeling about this and pointing out the flawed and inconsistent wording, definitions, and handling of mechanical aspects in the game?
PF2 has such a good foundation that could have been given hard-coded consistency, mechanical descriptions, Trait meaning, rule inheritance, and identical phrasing of abilities that are supposed to be handled in the same way but it just never happened. I still maintain that the best last thing they should have done about five years back when everything was still under wraps for the PF2 Playtest is to hire an experienced and talented data scientist who set forth methods, procedures, and requirements for ALL of the rules to use well vetted mechanical descriptions that are universally phrased so that we know for certain what everything means. Instead, they copped out and simply included some guidance to make up for their lack of this by publishing a paragraph talking about how ambiguous rules and interactions are the responsibility of the reader and/or GM to handle and thereby eschewing the responsibility to be clear, consistent, or even fair.
PF2 still came to be a fantastic and only marginally ambiguous game system that is very well balanced, but that is very much in spite of the failure to hire a programmer to ensure the mechanical rules are understandable and actually work/connect to the rest of the system properly.
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Because complaining about the exact word choice of half a sentence in a 600 page book having bad mouth feel is just the apex of nitpicky, and I find calling them ugly and cringeworthy unnecessarily loaded. It was an overreaction on my part, I'll admit.
If we are getting into it though... "The number of spells you can cast in a day is equal to your number of spell slots" would not actually be an accurate statement, because you can cast spells that aren't linked to spell slots. (At least in isolation from the first half of the sentence as the OP initially wrote.)
"The spells you can cast in a day are referred to as spell slots" actually means the spells you refresh daily are spell slots, which is a more accurate statement.
If you wanted to make Ed's suggestio work, it should be something like: "Characters of spellcasting classes can cast a certain number of spells each day; The number of these spells you can cast in a day is equal to your number of spell slots"
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Themetricsystem's comment reminds me that when EVE Online was first starting up, they hired an economist to ensure they got something resembling an actual free market in New Eden, and he worked for them for several years. I was kind of disappointed when he left.
CM: I like the wording in your last paragraph.
I would suggest:
"Some spells can only be case a limited number of times per day, this limit is referred to as Spell Slots."
That strikes me as both technically accurate, and natural sounding.
Innate spells often have daily limits without using spell slots.