This can’t be copyediting because this isn’t English. How do you generate a template for text that does not conform to any known linguistic patterns, a stylesheet for an anti-grammar?
I’m taking a break from a massive freelance-consultant project to bemoan the fact that techies cannot write.
This is a dangerous blanket assertion, and one that begs proving-wrong. In fact, I have quite a few extremely well-written blogs by luminous and brilliant techies on my links page.
However, brilliance in one area does not a polymath make, and I’ll reiterate: techies cannot write. They usually have no eye for design either, but that’s a whole other topic, and another post. (Here’s a preview: Web 2.0 is ugly.)
They are in good company, though. Recall the notorious, perhaps apocryphal, anecdote of Einstein in the string quartet, and its punchline: “The problem with you, Albert, is that you simply cannot count.” It’s painfully rare that experts (even geniuses) in any discipline can express themselves well in writing. In my freshman Intro Philo course, I found that the first philosopher in over 5,000 years who could write well and clearly present his thoughts as brilliantly and precisely as they merited was David Hume—in the mid-eighteenth century.
Freud was another utterly brilliant writer, which is why it’s unsurprising that his theories are more respected by literary critics and philosophers than by scientists. John Stuart Mill’s got some crisp prose in places. Nietzsche’s popularity can be attributed entirely to his masterful writerly prose, because his main actual ideas are not only plagarized wholesale from Husserl and Schopenhauer, but also painfully flawed. Schopenhauer is wonderfully readable, if purple in places, and quite delightfully snippy—particularly on the subject of his archrival, Hegel, which is a large part of why he is so much fun. And that’s about it for philosophers who can write, at least until we hit the stride of the twentieth-century.
Einstein was a fantastic writer.
When I read a novel, I can devour approximately 200 pages in an hour. When I read Kant or Descartes, it can take me two or three hours to read a single page, or even a paragraph. Tonight’s technical writers are Kantian writers.
But Hume was a powerful turning point for me in many ways: it wasn’t just that I agreed fiercely with his views; I fell madly in love with their expression. David Hume was the first in what was to be a long line of long-dead men who I developed “intellectual crushes” on over the years. When I finally declared my double-major in Philosophy and Creative Writing, I also declared, out loud, the rationale for that choice: if I could think well and write well, my degree would prepare me for anything I chose to do in the future.
Tonight, that future includes translating from acronym-laden computer-speak to plain-old user-friendly general-public English. In the past I’ve translated enormous passages of French and German that made more sense, that came out cleaner. But starting with such rough source, both grammatically and in terms of organization, is positively fun to edit. I’m also learning a lot; every term that I look up, every abbreviation I Googlexplicate, is making me better at what I’m doing, is moving me closer to where I want to be.
When the techies can’t write, the writers must tech.
