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Re: The state of State

Subject: Re: The state of State
From: James Barrow <vrfour -at- earthlink -dot- net>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Mon, 29 Nov 2004 06:12:37 -0800


Being able to write a well-structured paragraph has served me well in all of the contract positions that I've held. In almost all of the interviews I've participated in, I've faced an elderly gentleman (mid to late 120's) who has held to the belief that the cornerstone of any IT department is the documentation. Some have wanted pristine grammar, while others have focused on cohesive sentences. No matter what they were focusing on individually, they all asked me to do the same thing: just don't let us look stupid because of common spelling/grammatical errors.

Ironically, my current project is for the government. The subject matter experts for this project have asked all the tech writers to do the same thing when rejecting our drafts for rewrites: dumb it down. Seriously. We spend more time finding three-letter, monosyllabic words so that our text is "easily understandable".

- Jim

On Nov 28, 2004, at 5:55 AM, Bruce Byfield wrote:

Dick Margulis wrote:

I don't mind making the corrections--that's part of what the author is paying me for. I mind that the Major State University (and please don't think I'm coyly identifying a school whose initials are MSU, because that is not the case) has people on its English faculty whose standards are so low for the writing of graduate students that they don't bother to correct the most obvious solecisms. No wonder we have such a glut of people with advanced degrees who can't string seven English words together to make a well formed utterance.

To be fair, you don't really know what "reviewed" in this case means. Your client could be exaggerating a very casual reading. Equally likely, he could be ignoring some advice he did receive, possibly because he didn't understand it.

I ran into these sorts of attitudes all the time when I was teaching English at a university. No matter how carefully I explained that I was commenting only on structure, not grammar, or described the more common errors that the student should edit before handing the paper into me, some students would completely ignore the context of the comments and feel aggrieved when the paper was actually marked.


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References:
The state of State: From: Dick Margulis
Re: The state of State: From: Bruce Byfield

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