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This letter is an excellent illustration of why good writing matters, and why bad writing can be disastrous. The most important sentence in the letter ("The re
by Pitarou 11y ago
This letter is an excellent illustration of why good writing matters, and why bad writing can be disastrous.
The most important sentence in the letter ("The result would be a catastrophe of the highest order - loss of human life.") is at the end of the third paragraph, and is effectively hidden by two paragraphs of dense, technical jargon that I, as a layman, cannot understand at all.
I honestly think that if he had just taken that sentence and moved it to the end of the first paragraph, 7 astronauts' lives could have been saved.
- banku_brougham 11y agoyeah - management only reads the first sentence and first bullet point in my experience. sick.
- djcapelis 11y agoI strongly doubt it and I don't think you've worked in an engineering environment if you think this is true. This document is written as a credible engineering analysis of a distinct problem and uses extremely strong terms. It isn't addressed to the general public, or an article on Buzzfeed, it is an interdepartmental memo from an engineer signed by his manager to the Vice President of Engineering. Your example of "clear writing" would have just made this engineer look hyperbolic and likely undermined the issue even more. In a document like this, stating the physical problem up front is clear writing, and then, once the engineering problem is stated, he immediately states the possible outcome and then describes what he says as the management failure to allocate the appropriate resources, and how to fix it. How it comes off to you as a layman doesn't dictate whether or not this is good writing. He wasn't writing it to you.
- Pitarou 11y agoI respectfully disagree. Safety is of the highest priority, so if there's a serious risk to human life, there's nothing hyperbolic about drawing attention to it. If you can't do that, there's something very wrong with your engineering culture. To help the busy reader, the first paragraph of a memo should summarize the whole document. (Like the abstract of a technical paper.) This document is about an engineering problem and it's serious consequences, so they should both be mentioned in the first paragraph.
- djcapelis 11y agoI think it's extremely misguided to assume that the problem here was a matter of writing style. I think it's naive to assume that the people who received this memo weren't aware that it was bringing attention to an engineering issue that could lead to loss of human life. I think it's misguided and not supported by the evidence to assume that was the gap in understanding that lead to the problem. They're working on rockets. People working on rockets know what the stakes are. These are the risks engineering projects like this are structured around dealing with. And I think it's pretty disrespectful to the engineer who is still haunted by this to say that what he really should have done was switch some sentences around and that would have totally solved the problem. This is a strongly worded document. Making safety a priority doesn't mean starting every engineering document with the words "loss of life" which is a really common outcome of engineering failures on programs like this. Making safety a priority means putting the risk of an engineering failure up front and knowing that an engineering failure in a life-critical system is critical. Making safety a priority means people don't have to tell you what the stakes are every single sentence, because everyone already knows and so what you really communicate is how much risk there is, not the fact that risk exists. Making safety a priority means even if you're working on an engineering problem that wouldn't lead to loss of life, you fix the thing because you might be wrong and it might be part of a correlated failure one day that does lead to loss of life. Making safety a priority doesn't involve writing engineering documents in a way that makes them more amenable to skimming. It's a rocket. Engineering doesn't have to go that far wrong on rockets for people to die. When someone sends a letter to a VP of engineering which begins with "This letter is written to insure that management is fully aware of the seriousness" then everyone who receives that memo is paying attention and if they aren't then it's not the writing skills of the people involved that are at fault. I don't think a single person who was aware of the O-ring issue was unaware of the stakes. That didn't show up in any reports on the panel. What did show up was they estimated the risk of the problem wrong. The first sentence of this engineer's letter went towards establishing the seriousness of the engineering failure. Because that was the part that needed to be communicated most clearly.
- Pitarou 11y agoOkay. You've convinced me. Thanks for taking the time to explain your thoughts on this. :-)
- patmcguire 11y agoI wonder if he sent this without any editing from someone else. Might be meddling...
- patmcguire 11y agoFound this on my own, manager sign off on it. Was probably involved... which could mean a lot, either in improvement or detriment.
- vlehto 11y agoMechanical engineering is my field and the first two paragraphs would be hebrew to me without a good drawing.