That’s an interesting case you make. But I also work with brilliant engineers, and their language, as “colorful” and “interesting” and full of “flavor” as it may be, frankly sucks goat asses when it comes to plainly and clearly describing spacecraft test procedures. In my field, there is often only one right way to perform a particular test. If that test is performed incorrectly, or carelessly, shit like this happens. Case and tense errors can make that sort of phrasing very unclear indeed.
I reject Engineering Change Requests on a weekly basis because they are incomplete, unclear, or riddled with typos or grammar errors. My basic point is this: if the author couldn’t be bothered to check the spelling (or have someone check it for him), how the hell can I trust that he checked the engineering? Poor spelling is an indicator of poor attention to detail.
I spent the better part of two full work days in Los Angeles reading my program’s top-level requirements (just the ones at the system level – no subsystem requirements) and ensuring that each one was written clearly and did not contradict the others. The requirements needed to be written clearly because they were legal obligations upon which millions of dollars of effort depend. And I was a pain in the contractors’ asses the whole time I was there, because those millions are your tax dollars. Of course, if you prefer “flavor” then I can let a few things slide – who cares if they refer to the filter as blocking a “band” or a “channel”, as long as it’s got flavor?
Imprecision in language is acceptable in informal communication, but has no place in engineering. So, Coffee Manic, let’s get technical. Do your engineers write requirements documents? Do they write interface compatibility documents? Do they write phrases which obligate your company to do millions of dollars’ worth of work? If they’re so “brilliant”, then why can’t they figure out how to use the spell-checker?
Emphasis added. Heh heh heh, Gaudere’s Law strikes again.
To be fair, though, the sentence you quoted, “There shall be no more than one controller for each major piece of equipment”, is linguistically correct. It doesn’t violate any “standard rules of grammar and sentence construction” or any other conventions of proper English. The problem is just that it doesn’t mean what the engineer actually wanted to say, which was “There shall be one and only one controller for each major piece of equipment”. The author of the sentence in this case had a semantic problem, not a grammatical or syntactic one.
You are quite right that confusion is also often caused by poor grammar and syntax, not to mention spelling. Consider these classic examples:
“I had mentioned frequently the server crashed, but nothing was done about it.” (Does the author mean that the server crashed frequently, or that s/he frequently mentioned a particular server crash?)
“I notified the admin about my intents of diagnosing when the problem happened again.” (Did the author tell the admin that s/he intended to diagnose the problem, or that s/he had performed intensive diagnosing? And had the problem “happened again” before the notification, or after, or not yet?)
But the example you gave, though it’s definitely an instance of poor communication, doesn’t count as poor communication due to incorrect English usage. It’s a case of something being semantically wrong without being linguistically incorrect.
As was pointed out, the original statement lacked the communication of the idea, even though it WAS written properly. So, yes, the engineer made a mistake.
Had he said, “Every major piece of equipment will of had it’s own controler installed”, the statement would have been improper English (for many different reasons), but the idea would have been communicated much more clearly than in his original, perfectly proper sentence.
Jurph, you have a very good point – technical writing for publication is a different animal from casual speech or semi-formal writing (such as memos), because they serve different functions. With human lives or millions of dollars at stake, a certain style of writing is required, which leaves absolutely no room for interpretation. In those cases, such a tight, rigid style is the only practical way to communicate the idea.
It should be noted, though, that such a style has its own “flavor” or “color” – the reader knows instantly that the document is some sort of legal instrument.
As long as I brought all this up, I’d like to take this moment to publicly plead with the publishers of Doyle Brunson’s orginal “Super System” to go back and edit the damn thing properly so I can read it. As it is, with the wacky punctuation and style (every third word or phrase bolded or italisized, random expclamation points, etc.) I get a headache about half a page in. Some of us actually absorb the punctuation… it’s the same theory as ALL CAPS BEING THE EQUIVALENT OF YELLING.
I know it won’t help, I just needed to write it down somewhere publicly.
