Scantlings

Can someone tell me what is going with otherwise brilliant people under 40 that they can't or won't catch dozens of simple errors in critical documents related to brutally regulated and audited projects? Their careers hang in the balance here and they still can't do it right. I have to proofread everything.

Anyone else noticing this? What is it, some environmental toxin?

No, as my Mom would have said, "They ain't been brung up right." (Something she'd say about me too.)

In a culture which has abandoned proper punctuation, as a "waste of time", and has no clue what a semi-colon is for, it's clear that they are not well educated. Sadly, things which are easily learned in primary school are difficult once one's brain has been fully wired; to correct a simple error like the use of "are" and "is" becomes nearly impossible after 30.

This has been combined with a lack of ability to hold focus on any task for longer than 1min 30sec; partially due to video games and partially do to the destruction of our movie/tv/video narratives into snap-shots and sound bites. I believe that a simple clear statement which is brief is the best way to communicate. But we've fallen into: Short - Snappy - Vacuous.

This is NOT a problem brought on by poor schools. We can lay this one directly at the feet of the parents, folks our age, who didn't raise these 30 somethings correctly.

I wasn't brought up particularly well, I don't think, but I can catch cut and paste errors, wrong dates, failure to remove form instructions, spaces between sentences, inconsistent formatting, and text that contradicts text. These people, who are smarter than I am thank God, can't.

Email and texting have wrought havoc on writing skills, for sure.

Resumes that I've received from college students over the past few years have taken a sharp decline as well. Lots of grammatical, spelling, and punctuation errors. It's easy to look past the lack of experience (they are still in school after all) but sometimes it can be hard to look past the shoddy proof-reading.

I was once building a house and the owners sent me their college student son (who was on summer break) to help out with project. He could pound nails well enough so I drew nice guide lines on plywood sheathing and said "I want a minimum of 6 nails, equally spaced, on each line." I came back later to find lines with 4, 5, or 6 (never 7) nails per line, with some of the nails missing the line (and the stud behind).

His head was not in the game.

Steve

Orestes Munn wrote:I wasn't brought up particularly well, I don't think, but I can catch cut and paste errors, wrong dates, failure to remove form instructions, spaces between sentences, inconsistent formatting, and text that contradicts text. These people, who are smarter than I am thank God, can't.

There has to be an app for that...

I don’t think it’s stressed by the education system that in the working world there is no partial credit. First thing I have to tell new members of my team is that they really don’t want me to be the one that finds the Waldo. Still happens.

The fact that elite academic scientists are professional writers by trade also seems to be lost on these highly educated and almost-middle-aged adults.

In large law firms it used to be common for the associates to intentionally insert errors to see if the partner was actually proofreading. After the partner was done, the associates would remove the errors. Money was wagered. Once in a while, people got caught. While sloppiness may be more prevalent among the under 40 crowd, there is plenty to go around.

I once inserted a reward of $100 cash in a long memo going to the VP's of a major oil company. No one collected.

I used to supervise a number on engineers. There are no worse writers on the planet. I'm convinced I was promoted ahead of everyone else because I was the only person whose prose could be understood. Well, except for my letters of recommendation, Orestes can tell you about that.

He does write one hell of a reference. Can’t wait to see one for somebody he likes.

We had (emphasis on 'had') a 'marketing' person whose writing, grammar and proof reading skills were so bad I had to require everything to be approved by me. I'm not perfect and I sure as heck had better things to do but it drove me nuts. The current one is much better, but I still put an eye on things. Mostly, if I rewrite, it's just to smooth things up a bit as it's generally not a blatant error. My primary (stated) reason to look at things now is to look at whatever goes out from a risk/legal perspective, as in "Do we REALLY want to say or promise that?" (but I do like that Google docs allow me to make 'suggestions' rather than simply edit). Funny thing, they always accept my 'suggestions' and ,mostly, I like that....!

The crazy thing about all this is that the Grammarly App takes care of this. I just checked, it costs ZERO for the minimum version, yes it is free. A bit more for the more complex version.

So, they are even too lazy to use a free app that addresses the problem.

I have found that engineers and naval artichokes are no longer required to learn how to draw properly. I have had to red line drawing's which were impossible to understand, with the wrong line weights and linetypes, poor spelling, poorly arranged views and more. For the money they are paying to go to school you would think a few drafting classes would be included.

BeauV wrote:The crazy thing about all this is that the Grammarly App takes care of this. I just checked, it costs ZERO for the minimum version, yes it is free. A bit more for the more complex version.

So, they are even too lazy to use a free app that addresses the problem.

And I thought my post was a joke....

Olaf Hart wrote:

BeauV wrote:The crazy thing about all this is that the Grammarly App takes care of this. I just checked, it costs ZERO for the minimum version, yes it is free. A bit more for the more complex version.

So, they are even too lazy to use a free app that addresses the problem.

And I thought my post was a joke....

It’s funnier now.

JoeP wrote:I have found that engineers and naval artichokes are no longer required to learn how to draw properly. I have had to red line drawing's which were impossible to understand, with the wrong line weights and linetypes, poor spelling, poorly arranged views and more. For the money they are paying to go to school you would think a few drafting classes would be included.

Naval artichokes? Now who's not proofreading?

No, artichokes is correct, so long as the butter is well drawn.

JoeP wrote:I have found that engineers and naval artichokes are no longer required to learn how to draw properly. I have had to red line drawing's which were impossible to understand, with the wrong line weights and linetypes, poor spelling, poorly arranged views and more. For the money they are paying to go to school you would think a few drafting classes would be included.

We're having these same issues in the Architectural Engineering world. Back when I was in school, we had to take hand drafting courses prior to moving to CAD. Having to pre-layout a sheet of vellum prior to putting any pencils to it made for a well though out and coherent set of drawings.

Those learned lessons have carried through my career to today and I do my best to drill it into the young engineers who come to work for us. Unfortunately, some don't quite get it.

Just returned from a 7 day R&R with old friends in Dana Point. Spent most of 2 days dealing with an urgent project that a Project Engineer 4 years out of college couldn’t connect the dots and work the end to end details. Had to walk him through each step. Competent to talented engineer but can’t think beyond right now and hopeless if assigned more than one task at a time.

His predecessor, with an honors degree from Clark School at UMD, got fired because in over a year, he had to be managed through each day and I found him sleeping at his desk more than once. His fatal error was putting a 125 KW generator into cool down mode on a Friday afternoon before a long weekend and then forgetting to shut it down 5 minutes later. When folks came in on Tuesday morning, it was still happily idling away. Had no answer to “Didn’t you wonder what the noise was before you left?”

Then there is the material support specialist who spent most of her time shopping, reading online horoscopes and job hunting on her office computer. That and posting on Facebook during business hours while telling me how hard she was working and how much she deserved a significant pay raise.

I don't really think that programming computers teaches folks much, they have to know how to think before they can do it. But is most certainly teaches planning and detail. There is now way to fail faster in programming that continuously leaving out a ";" or putting a "." in the wrong place. Without planning, a programmer ends up with a long rambling piece of code (rather like some of my posts ) which no-one (not even the author) can understand or debug.

It's one of the reason there are so many x-programmers today.

Rob McAlpine wrote:No, artichokes is correct, so long as the butter is well drawn.

I find that hard to swallow.

Jamie wrote:

Rob McAlpine wrote:No, artichokes is correct, so long as the butter is well drawn.

I find that hard to swallow.

It can be a thorny subject.

Rob McAlpine wrote:

Jamie wrote:

Rob McAlpine wrote:No, artichokes is correct, so long as the butter is well drawn.

I find that hard to swallow.

It can be a thorny subject.

Hey, you guys are pretty good! Actually I intentionally spelled it that way. It is an old humorous moniker I first heard in school.

This is not at all a problem my postdocs have—they are traditionally trained and very cognizant of their limitations—but I love it anyway.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/14/opinion/sunday/elon-musk-thailand-hubris.html?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share

Rob McAlpine wrote:I once inserted a reward of $100 cash in a long memo going to the VP's of a major oil company. No one collected.

I used to supervise a number on engineers. There are no worse writers on the planet. I'm convinced I was promoted ahead of everyone else because I was the only person whose prose could be understood. Well, except for my letters of recommendation, Orestes can tell you about that.

This.

I have always worked in high tech, engineerig companies. I am not an engineer (history and business degree). After hanging out with smart engineers and technologists, it has rubbed off, and most people think I’m an engineer. But the biggest differentiator for me has been my ability to write and communicate to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Thanks, Liberal Arts education.

Just reading through this thread (containing a few typos), reinforces my belief that it's much harder for most people, whatever their age, to edit on a screen than it is with hard-copy.

I usually print out anything important (grading "comments," college recs, etc) and go through it with a red pen.

Throw in colored text, weird fonts and background colors and it gets worse. Add the variability of individual screen brightness, font size etc, it's a miracle anything intelligible ever emerges from our computers.

Here's an early paper on the phenom:

http://www.laurenscharff.com/research/AHNCUR.html

Slick470 wrote:

JoeP wrote:I have found that engineers and naval artichokes are no longer required to learn how to draw properly. I have had to red line drawing's which were impossible to understand, with the wrong line weights and linetypes, poor spelling, poorly arranged views and more. For the money they are paying to go to school you would think a few drafting classes would be included.

We're having these same issues in the Architectural Engineering world. Back when I was in school, we had to take hand drafting courses prior to moving to CAD. Having to pre-layout a sheet of vellum prior to putting any pencils to it made for a well though out and coherent set of drawings.

Those learned lessons have carried through my career to today and I do my best to drill it into the young engineers who come to work for us. Unfortunately, some don't quite get it.

+2. The easier it is to go back and change a set of drawings, the less thought goes into their design up front. A well thought out foundation seems to be lost in the 'DO IT NOW!' world we live in. People throw absolute junk on paper and no one goes back through to check it.

Audrey wrote:

Slick470 wrote:

JoeP wrote:I have found that engineers and naval artichokes are no longer required to learn how to draw properly. I have had to red line drawing's which were impossible to understand, with the wrong line weights and linetypes, poor spelling, poorly arranged views and more. For the money they are paying to go to school you would think a few drafting classes would be included.

We're having these same issues in the Architectural Engineering world. Back when I was in school, we had to take hand drafting courses prior to moving to CAD. Having to pre-layout a sheet of vellum prior to putting any pencils to it made for a well though out and coherent set of drawings.

Those learned lessons have carried through my career to today and I do my best to drill it into the young engineers who come to work for us. Unfortunately, some don't quite get it.

+2. The easier it is to go back and change a set of drawings, the less thought goes into their design up front. A well thought out foundation seems to be lost in the 'DO IT NOW!' world we live in. People throw absolute junk on paper and no one goes back through to check it.

The "DO IT NOW!" part is combined with the liberal use of the "delete" key and spelling/grammar checkers/correctors to convince folks that nothing is "final" and they aren't responsible for it being correct. One of Wayne's biggest challenges in training new shipwrights is getting them to measure things accurately. He has found that if they are playing music in their earphones while measuring, they make serious errors. So there is that problem as well.