The necessity of writing

For years as a writing teacher I've told reluctant students - usually engineers - that they need to learn to write to be successful. They don't need to do it wonderfully, but they do need to do it adequately.

This necessity has been driven home several times over the last few months. Just the other day, I read about paper written by physicists about magic (it's for an article on technology and magic in medieval literature, and in all fairness, it was about quantum physics). Now, granted, all the primary researchers were located in Spain, so English may not have been a language they could use comfortably. But even with that in mind, there were so many hyperbolic lines of the "since the dawn of time" kind, that I cringed over and over again.

In addition, several months ago I was working with a document created by engineering professionals, designed to act as a training manual. We were to convert the content of the paper version to an elearning program.

Usually, when I work with material from an SME (subject matter expert), my biggest concern is translating written text into the visual and audible forms that perform better on the web. But this time, I spent a huge amount of time rewriting the content. There were problems in the document that were so fundamental that I despaired of repairing them even.

Some sentences were so garbled that I had no idea what it was meant to convey. There were lots of sentence fragments, and some sentences that just left off mid-sentence, as if it was cut-off (though it wasn't!) Faulty parallelisms were rampant, and the document showed little evidence of editing since the topics seemed to be arranged in the order that they occurred to the writer rather than any logical arrangement.

I've always believed that comma use was highly individualistic and variable, but this document used commas in ways that were utterly baffling, as if the writer knew there were rules to using commas and they needed to be followed, but had forgotten the rules and just made them up as he/she went along.

All in all, developing the content for this elearning program was one of the most painful tasks I'd ever undertaken for this company.

In all the time I stood in front of classrooms of engineers, lecturing on the importance of good writing, my motivation was primarily to get them producing things by the end of the term that I could read without cringing. But now that I've seen the result of poor writing skills, I've got even more motivation to teach them (and other writers) how to write clearly, because after reading this training manual, I feel sorry for all the people who tried to learn from it!