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Re: Technical Writing - What's the catch?

Subject: Re: Technical Writing - What's the catch?
From: "Jerry Muelver" <jerry -at- hytext -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Wed, 30 Mar 2005 06:39:54 -0600


From: Lou Quillio
....

Ahem. Tough love time.

Pal, your writing sucks. I'm sorry, I really am, but you need to hear
this. It sucks. Bad. Somewhere in that cloud of perfume is a point
you could've made in two sentences. Digging it out would miss the
larger problem. It's a disaster of bloat and misusage.

Honestly, honestly, honestly, I mean you no malice. Get out. This
ain't for you. You posted 442 words where fifty would do. No editor
will slog through that poppy field, he'll just get someone else. Plus
nearly every sentence contains a misusage -- the kind folks aren't
supposed to notice whilst enraptured by your prose.

No offense. Somebody's gotta say it. You won't even *start* to
improve before falling out of love with your own voice. There may not
be time.


I have to side with Lou on this one, although being the gentle, manipulative soul that I am, I would likely have taken a more delicate approach to the critique.

To improve an unsatisfactory situation, one has to be careful to adjust the aim of the solution, and concentrate efforts on fixing the right problem. A good starting place would be http://haleonline.com/psychtest/ with an objective eye on matching the attributes of the worker to the requirements of the job.

(Donald Trump is never around when you really need him.....)

---- Jerry Muelver

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References:
Technical Writing - What's the catch?: From: Rahul Prabhakar
Re: Technical Writing - What's the catch?: From: Lou Quillio

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