Mad Writing Skillz

[crokett]

When I took placement exams for college I placed out of every writing/english class they had. Since it was a core requirement, I got stuck in a 300-level class with some english major seniors. (I was a comp sci major). Anyhoo, after 15 years of updating trouble tickets, bug testing reports, email and several thousand forum posts I have lost a lot of the skills I had.

I am proofreading the final draft of a report for an eval of a customer network. Me and one other guy co-authored it and I am looking at some of what I wrote and mourning the loss of my writing skills.

[JR]

I share that space, brother.

When I get in an email flurry things can get pretty stupid. Then it overflows to my more serious communictions. Then a critical document looks like an eighth-grader wrote it.

None of this is helped by my ever-stiffer digits. There's nothing like an evening wrestling wood to turn my typind hands into clubs.

JR

[jackellis]

Me and one other guy co-authored it and I am looking at some of what I wrote and mourning the loss of my writing skills.

Well maybe you've explained something I've noticed among a lot of the folks I work with, which is how poorly they write. A lot of them are tail-end boomers, too. It drives me absolutely nuts because I tend to rewrite almost everything that comes across my desk so I can understand what they meant to say and for that reason, I often miss the forest for the trees.

I'm an engineer and I also skipped all of the typical lower-level English courses in college because I was taught well in grammar and high school. A large part of my job these days is writing the equivalent of legal briefs (but they're for regulatory matters). Practice helps. So does peer review.

Years ago, I read a short article by Malcom Forbes (of Forbes magazine) in which he marked up a piece of business correspondence that was written in the form of a typical business letter. He changed it from the third person to the first person, got rid of a lot of the dependent clauses, and essentially rewrote the letter so it read the same way someone would say it rather than the way an academic would write it. I learned a lot from that one article and it still serves me very well.

Oh yeah, you did mean to say, "A colleague and I" rather than "Me and one other guy", right?

[JR]

Practice helps. So does peer review.

Those are wise words.

It is extremely beneficial to have a no-ego review of grammar and style. I believe one should save the arguments for the subtance, but usually the grammar review should be accepted gracefully.

Which reminds me of the first user's manual review I chaired as a young product manager. I had co-authored the document with a tech writer (a self-proclaimed MENSA acolyte!). There were about 10 people in the room, all of whom, apart from me, were non-native English speakers. We noodled through every gramatical expression until my eyes bled! I learned a lot from that experience.

JR