edit: actually, this is an excellent demonstration of bad writing -- or rather 'blogging -- on behalf of whomever runs engineerwriting.jottit.com. The post is a straight copy out of another source, with a link to the source, with no explanation of what is going on, no discussion on the material, no value-add in general.
This is something that I struggle with in my link-sharing emails to my friends. After literally thousands of link-share emails, it starts to get hard to say something original beyond "I thought this was funny/interesting/etc", which eventually becomes practically worn into my keyboard. But then this is a good indicator to me that maybe the link isn't worth sharing. If I can't come up with something more interesting to say than "this is funny", then I don't need to be wasting my friends' time with it, because they have their own lists of pages that they peruse and they don't need me filling up their inbox with 25 new conversation threads in a single day.
I pasted it to Jottit because a) I don't have a blog that's relevant to the topic, b) the original comment is hard to link to accurately due to sloppy coding on ET, and c) I wanted to try Jottit after learning about it. I considered adding an explanatory paragraph, but I felt it could be crude and self-promotional (if someone says something, they should have their name against it) as the quote stands alone pretty well.
The issues you raise regarding link sharing are valid, and exist, but in this case it's really just a cut and paste job (and if it were not interesting, I doubt it'd get 100 upvotes here). I could have put it on Gist, Pastie, or 101 other sites. The quote is the whole bit. No analysis necessary.
Nonetheless, this would have worked better as a brief personal blog post. If I get back into personal blogging, I'd certainly tackle it that way instead.
I think the basic advice offered in the article is solid. It's not in the most aesthetically pleasing style, but what are you gonna do. I guess I just don't hate minor sentences as much as you do.
Yes, it's solid advice, but it is basic. If we're talking about "engineers", that probably means they have completed a college degree at some point. If an engineer completed a degree and didn't take a technical writing course that drilled these concepts into their heads, then I question the quality of such an engineer's education.
I think you underestimate the ability of some people to pass classes without learning anything. I met an engineering student who had somehow passed a tough, high-quality technical writing class and yet could not write a coherent sentence, let alone a useful paragraph. I suspect that he cheated his ass off in most of his classes.
You know, I feel no sympathy for such people. If the reason they don't know how to write "well-enough" is because they cheated their way through college, then they deserve whatever lack of career opportunities they find themselves in.
Make engineers write concise sentences by combining journalism with the technical report format. Paragraphs in a newspaper article are ordered by importance, so that at whatever point readers stop reading they know that the part they have read was more important than the part left unread.
I think the second paragraph is pretty good, especially given the emphasis on concise sentences.
So do you never use such structures in speech? They're a way of getting the point across clearly and succinctly. Just because they taught you it's "wrong" in school doesn't mean that it doesn't have value.
I wasn't aware that this was a comment on another piece. Yes, I use less formal grammar in less formal situations. I even experiment in the minimalist form with haiku and other writing. Knowing now that it was a comment makes a little more sense. Without knowing that, it just seemed like lazy writing.
edit: I didn't know this was a comment before I posted this, but it does bring up issues with 'blogging in general.