On Wed, 5 Sep 2012, John Jason Jordan wrote: > The favorite example of semantic drift is the English 'black,' which many, > including me, believe is derived from a word that originally meant > 'white.' Cf the Oxford English Dictionary:
That's politics at work. > Professor Susan Conrad of the PSU Department of Applied Linguistics > (together with others) has been instrumental in developing classes > designed to teach English academic writing. So far most of the effort has > been targeted at foreign students, but she has also worked to teach > English writing skills to engineers (her husband is an engineer). If > anyone is interested in developing classes to teach skills in writing > computer documentation she would be a good contact person. Academic writing is not necessarily a desired outcome. It's too often written by academics for other academics and frequently intended to show off the writer's superiority. Similar to legalese designed to obfuscate ideas so one is required to pay a lawyer (by the hour, too) to translate it so it's understandable to those not in the guild. Clear and effective writing can be learned. I used to write long, complex sentences (that was the style taught until a very few decades ago). When I escaped academia I had to teach myself how to write short, clear, effective sentences. Frequently, my first editing pass turned one sentence into three new ones that were much clearer. Application developers cannot write good documentation because they know exactly what's going on under the hood, how things are supposed to work, and how they designed the application to be used. Give the application to an end user and watch what they do. That elucidates how he sees the application and is quite frequently completely different from how the developer sees it. Rich -- Richard B. Shepard, Ph.D. | Integrity - Credibility - Innovation Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc. | Helping Ensure Our Clients' Futures <http://www.appl-ecosys.com> Voice: 503-667-4517 Fax: 503-667-8863 _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
