How proper is proper? 5

[macmet]

I'm wondering how much attention I should pay to tiny details when submitting a report.

Everything I submit I spend a fairly significant time editing format. For example, I was just doing up a report for my boss and a plant manager of one of our customer's. It was all ready to go, printed, when I noticed at one point I had "Site No:." instead of "Site No.:". So I printed the page off again.

I know that when I read someone's report and I see a spelling mistake or sa table with different formatting from the others, I lose a little bit of respect for it.

Am I just being ridiculous here or are others like me?

 

[TurbulentFluid]

I go with JMW's last paragraph. There is a line between the purpose and the form of the report, and it should never be crossed in favour of the form. If you spend 30% of the time creating an idea, and 70% correcting the grammar while you're trying to convey it, you're not working at an optimum.
IMO.

 

[GregLocock]

Sorry, I disagree completely. It is not unusual for me to take two days to write a report explaining a calculation that took a couple of hours to sort out.

A few years back two of us worked through a problem on the basis of a 5 minute discussion. We then went off and did a morning of checking out. We then presented a plan that has saved the company we work for something like $40 million. It involved a complete commitment by the project team to achieve that, you can bet damn well we had to justify every dotted i and every crossed t.

Big ideas need good salesmanship. One of the rules of spaceship design : " A bad idea, well presented, lives to fight another day. A good idea badly presented never gets that chance."

Cheers

Greg Locock

Please see FAQ731-376 for tips on how to make the best use of Eng-Tips.

 

[wgchere]

He says, "So what!?! You understood it, didn't you?"

I respond, "I had to guess at a couple of things and had to re-read it three times to figure out the rest!"

This conversation occurs about 6 times a week between a designer and me, his checker. And that's about a drawing, not a report! Oy Vey!

 

[wgchere]

I recently read a report on the Web about MS Word spell checker and Grammar checker. After a lot of study they came to the conclusion that the gramar checker was nearly worthless and the spell checker was better, but both were only effective in the hands of someone who already knew grammar and was a good speller!

Many moons ago, when I was in university, I had a lab partner in a CAD class. We were discussing a project we were working on and he used the phrase, "Them are the ones we want!" I chuckled a bit, thinking he was being funny. The university was in the intermountain west of the US, and such grammar was heard occasionaly. Well, after a few more of these it was obvious that he was really talking, and not goofing around. Sadly, that lack of education made it very difficult to accept his credibility as an engineer. If he has a hard time with grammar school education, how can I trust his college education?

 

[prost]

Can you imagine I found a spelling mistake in my 10 yr. old dissertation? I was mortified. What can you do? Almost every paper I read has a mistake; sometimes the mistakes change the whole meaning of what the author is trying to say. Having gone through, like most of you, periods of intense pressure to get a document out the door, I can sympathize. Understanding those pressures, you can relate to finding a small mistake or two, can't you?

 

[Senselessticker]

When I sat down for an interview a few years ago there was a misspelling circled (very obviously in red ink!!), on MY resume as the person conducting the interview pulled my resume from his desk and began scanning over it! Upon seeing this, I was quick to make a joke about getting to skip the “attention to detail” questions!!

I still work very hard to make my boss laugh when I screw up!

Like Greglocock, I spend about 10% of my time on analysis and 90% of my time on writing the report of the analysis. We laugh about this to ourselves, but the rest of the world perceives engineers as meticulous detail gurus with little common sense (sadly.....this is often the case). I suppose being obsessive about the little things is simply a necessary evil that goes with the territory.

 

[HgTX]

prost--I hate it when I have to look at my thesis. Every time I look at it I catch something else wrong with it, and not a thing I can do about it. And that's after it had several people look at it, I looked at it with each round, and then it went through another round of review when it got converted from a university thesis to a state-sponsored report.

Kinda like visual inspection of yard after yard of fillet weld. It's almost never the case that the second person to inspect the weld doesn't find anything the first person missed.

Hg

Eng-Tips policies: faq731-376

 

[jmw]

Let's work with your figures, Greg:

If I spend 10% of the time working out the engineering (the bit that's generates the revenue) and 90% getting the report right, that's fine, if that's the balance to get the engineering ideas expressed, but if that is 80% getting the ideas expressed correctly and 10% getting the spelling and grammar right, then that is 10% engineering effort lost forever.

At a guess, my time working on engineering ideas is worth more than my time spent getting it letter perfect.

IF i write something for publication, it will be proof read by a professional proof-reader, the publicity agent the company employs. They employ these people because it is their job to get these things right, not mine.

If the company does not recognise or acknowledge a similar need in reports and will not pay experts to proof read reports, it is because they don't consider it necessary.

If management thought my grammar and spelling skills were perfect they would save themselves the expense of proof reading. If they thought it necessary for reports, they would employ a proofreader in the office.

Ergo, management want 20% money makers from me and only 80% report writing effort.

Think about what your time is worth and where your time is more profitably spent. If you obseeively use your time to get spelling right, maybe you ought to consider the options. Tell management that you'd rather work at engineering and make a case for a proofreader.

Hey, what project that will save $40million can't afford a proof reader? who, even in management, will reject a $40,000,000 pay day for a misplaced comma. (yeah, i know form experience they will lose money for all sorts of stupid reasons, but for a comma or a spelling mistake?)


JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[melone]

How about a decimal point?

 

[jmw]

If it's a decimal point it isn't grammar and spelling, is it?


JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[kchayfie]

But its all part of the same proof-reading requirements...

 

[IRstuff]

YOU are responsible for anything with your name attached. A proofreader usually has neither ownership nor interest in your writings nor sufficient technical knowledge to truly understand what you are trying to convey. Technical writers know about short, snappy sentences, and often cannot seem to grasp the notion that not all ideas can be conveyed in short, snappy sentences.

And frankly, the overally ability of people to spell correctly has decreased considerably in the last 20 yrs. They make the same type of mistakes that spell-checkers make, e.g., compliment instead of complement, etc.

TTFN

 

[JStephen]

IR stuff, I find myself making those kinds of mistakes when I KNOW the difference! Grrrr...

On the bright side, I did catch the grammar checker confusing "advice" and "advise"- it wants me to use "advice" for a verb.

 

[quark]

Apart from spelling mistakes and grammar, I also try to put symmetry or good looks into the document. This consumes most of the time but I am helpless. Though I spend lot of time, I feel something wrong whenever I try to read my past documents or posts in this site. I, being a non native english speaker, discount the mistakes myself.

Still, I do like a perfect(?) document.

 

[TurbulentFluid]

Do you also use coloured, scented paper?
I'm confused about all this... of course calculations must be flawless and decimal point errors are NOT allowed, and of course grammar and spelling have to be correct, and yes, I myself often find reports and stuff with horrible grammar/spelling questionable, but spending half a day on pondering whether a single sentence REALLY needs a comma or not seems a waste of time and money. While I'm not a native English speaker, I never recieved a complaint from anywhere/anyone that I wasn't understood, and my boss, who piles all the English stuff on my desk, never complained about my errors either. If he wants better, he should've employed an English, not an Engineering major.

 

[kchayfie]

The most ridiculous obsessive-compulsive urge I have is this: once I've finished the report to my satisfaction and pressed "print", then realised I forgot to set the printer up to print double-sided, I feel the need to either print it again or photocopy it double sided so that no one knows I wasted all that paper. Which I know defeats the object!

 

[quark]

Coloured paper, yes. I use colour papers as section dividers for regulatory documentation. Some auditors have good impression on this and no bad remarks so far.

Scented paper is something that I didn't try till now. Love letters are never considered as technical documents in this geography

 

[TurbulentFluid]

 

[jmw]

“….life, liberty and the pursuit of perfection” (paraphrased)
Word list:
Obsessive,
Compulsive
Undisciplined
Lack of attention to detail
Poor time management
Perfectionist
If you think "perfectionist" doesn’t belong in this list, you don’t work for HR.

Perfection is an unobtainable ideal and anyone who believes they can achieve perfection is doomed to always fail; but while the pursuit of perfection is laudable, that pursuit is governed by a law of diminishing returns.

I can buy an instrument accurate to (+/-)5% full scale for $10.
I can buy another accurate to (+/-)0.25% of reading for $5000.
What is the difference?

We don’t measure perfection, we measure achievement and we measure success.
Accuracy and precision have a price: it requires judgement to know to what degree absolute accuracy is approached.

Engineers succeed in an imperfect world because they know how to manage imperfection.
Everything is expressed in terms that define that lack of perfection: error limits, tolerances and confidence levels; and there are standards and codes of practice for most things.

Success is to find the limit of the cost/attainment(benefit) relationship that achieves the objective.
We must know what that limit is.

Why should we expect more of the written word? How do you measure perfection in the written word? How do you “know” and prove that what you have done is 100% accurate? How do you justify such a claim? How do you know where the limit is for diminishing returns?

Read the small print.
Almost any document or contract has clauses that are designed to protect against the consequences of imperfection. When all else fails we have insurance. The practical world is designed around imperfection.
The “Latent defects” clause in a contract is particularly useful.

If we must then I suggest we include our own small print in every document or report that declares that the standard of spelling (just as we have standards for everything else) is equal to or better than achieved using MS Word spellchecker.

Let us allow that in this thread, the statement of absolutes is but a shorthand form that actually means we are not worlds apart but only degrees of excellence apart.
Otherwise we will argue this same point time and again in thread after thread without resolution.

JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[melone]

"I can buy an instrument accurate to (+/-)5% full scale for $10.
I can buy another accurate to (+/-)0.25% of reading for $5000.
What is the difference?"

Confidence in the results. If I'm building a tree house, 5% accuracy is more than good enough. If I'm building the space ship, it may be unacceptable.

If I'm presenting a technical concept to my engineering peers, it is acceptable to misspell some words, or use poor grammer. However, if I am attempting to convey the same "type" (not neccessarily the same level of detail) of information to upper management, typos & poor grammar detract from my credibility.

Will I ever make a perfect presentation? Of course not. Should I do everything in my power to make it as perfect as possible? I think the answer is yes.