4 ms·
I would argue that inside a company it's communication that's important not polish. It's only when your company is interacting with the public that polish beco
by onemoreact 15y ago
I would argue that inside a company it's communication that's important not polish. It's only when your company is interacting with the public that polish becomes important.
- absconditus 15y agoI have found that those who write poorly in the corporate world generally think poorly as well.
- gnaritas 15y agoThat applies in general, not just in the corporate world. Lazy writing implies lazy thinking.
- MaysonL 15y agoYes, but... Lousy spelling and punctuation are not necessarily lazy writing.
- gnaritas 15y agoWhat else would you call them?
- jarek 15y agoNegatively motivated writing.
- drumdance 15y agoDyslexic. An ex-girlfriend of mine is very bright and gifted at logic (majored in philosophy), but her spelling and syntax are terrible.
- gnaritas 15y agoDisabilities don't count, I'm talking about people who can write better if they cared to try, not those who can't.
- onemoreact 15y agoI find those that think in such general terms also tend to think poorly ;-) My personal experience is the best writers rarely have much to say, but I have probably spent to much time in the consulting world where saying something meaningful is far less important than saying something well. Still, I try and avoid generalizing to much because incite rarely comes from generalities.
- jarek 15y agoThis is very valuable insight.
- pessimizer 15y agoThat's a pretty low blow. What he wrote was extremely clear, though clearly his punctuation was terrible and his spelling was shaky. If it had been read to you out loud, you wouldn't have noticed an issue: "Managers, salespeople, and lawyers with [a] poor understanding of math as basic as adding fractions are very risky. It's not that they can't perform most job functions, it's that they are extremely likely to make costly mistakes. 'When should I add one more person to keep people from charging as much overtime?' Or, the old: 'Should I offer overtime or comp time?' etc. As [for] salespeople and lawyers, effective negotiation require[s] them to be able to say: 'I can't drop the price any more but I can do X' (which costs us less), etc. "Graphic[...] designers often use a lot of math directly when working out layouts and things. An intuitive understanding and lots of effort can help compensate, but it's a significant loss if they can't do simple math on how tall / wide things are when you scale them." Is that written poorly enough to take the time to passive-aggressively call someone stupid on the internet?
- jarek 15y ago> If it had been read to you out loud, you wouldn't have noticed an issue Maybe someone should start working on a text-to-speech app for HN with built-in meaning detection, then? Without one, onemoreact's posts unfortunately were not read out loud to me, and I had to do double-takes for "vary", "preform", and "incite" (all real words pronounced differently than what was intended). The missing punctuation also made it difficult to parse the text given the absence of verbal pauses or tone changes.
- pessimizer 15y agoI'm not saying that I like to read emails like that, I'm saying that to accuse somebody of having difficulties thinking when they have difficulties in grammar and spelling is a low blow. The brother of an ex of mine is a dyslexic PhD geologist who uses a combination of text-to-speech and assistants to do a lot of important research work. English orthography is weird, and is largely used as a class marker to dismiss people with no regard to the content of what they're saying. In addition, it's not at all unlikely that English is onemoreact's second or third language. It'd be different if the argument was incoherent, or took a huge amount of effort to understand.