Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well

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.

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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.

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