4 ms·

Is anyone else baffled by how the article title talks about "failure to communicate" and then goes on to talk about basic things such as spelling and grammar?

• edash 16y ago
  That was my thought too. At the risk of being snarky, I read this article as: Boring exposition, boring transition, finally some data and then a hedged conclusion with no suggested solution. This article had impeccable grammar I'm sure, but I hardly cared because it had a weak, watered-down message. For a tech analogy, it's a bit like web service uptime. - No one will care unless something's wrong - It doesn't provide a net gain, it only prevents a net loss - It only matters if it's worth reading anyway
• silvestrov 16y ago
  This is because grammar is very important when writing technical specifications, as they can easily become ambiguous or plain nonsense. Example: "The users save the files on the server with the internet connection." Does the users use the internet connection to save files on the server? Or does this server have an internet connection (and the other servers don't), and this is how to know which server that they should use? Such ambiguous statements may result in the customer getting a very different system than they wanted. Another example of "failure to communicate": I received the following bug report today: "At the moment all umlauts (ä, ö, ü) will advertised in the wrong format." The problem? All accented letters were replaced by a question mark. I would have had no idea what the problem was, if it was not for the screen shot. Some companies simply cannot oursource their IT-dept as they cannot communicate in writing.