Re:Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
by cosmodisk on Friday May 31, 2019 @04:04PM
(#20064444)
I'm not a native English speaker. Half of the team I manage are native English speakers,the rest are not. The recent project they did on communication templates was checked by the French colleague,while I no longer forward some of the files to English native speakers because they can't form sentences thst are clear enough to understand by others. It is not easy for a lot of people.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
by catherd on Friday May 31, 2019 @09:00PM
(#20066422)
I work with a team that spans native speaker to barely able to form English sentences, and communicating clearly in a mixed audience like that is really a completely separate skill from native language use.
For the ones with minimal English it's often clearer to use phrasing that a native speaker would say is obviously wrong, but matches their native language patterns. Or use simpler but not-quite-appropriate words.
And for the native speakers, the awareness (or self-regulation) to eliminate idioms and less common vocabulary is nigh-impossible for some people.
Re:Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
by colanderman on Friday May 31, 2019 @10:33PM
(#20066817)
I find that awareness and avoidance of idioms is much easier once one has learned (well) a second language. I am fluent in Esperanto, and somewhat subconsciously translate much of what I write as I am writing it. It leads me to choose simpler words and grammatical constructs, and to avoid circumlocutions and especially idioms.