RE: Asimov - Assumptions, the audience and arithmetic

Subject: RE: Asimov - Assumptions, the audience and arithmetic
From: "Susan W. Gallagher" <SGallagher -at- akonix -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2001 16:05:48 -0700

> ...I have not seen a US-educated person under the age of 30 in a
> long, long
> time who could write worth a damn...
>
> By comparison, I rarely read anything written in English by
> someone educated
> outside the US, which has as many errors as I find in
> American writing.
> Even people for whom English is a second or third language do
> better than
> many native speakers...

Y'know, I sympathize with you about the math thing. I've had lots
of stereotypical math profs. And I'll agree that written English
suffers now-a-days. But lauding the skills of the ESL crowd? You
lost me there. Sorry.

When native English speakers write, they know what the language is
supposed to sound like and they know the idiomatic nuances of the
language. They may not be able to convey all of these things effectively
in their writing all the time, but they come close.

I have often had the task of rewriting documents written by non-natives,
and it has given me much amusement!

* It took me a while to realize that "in from off", which was repeated
several times throughout the document, really meant "in front of".

* While I caught the meaning immediately, there was still some cognitive
friction caused by, "Assign the number 1 to all even numbers and assign
the number 2 to all uneven numbers."

I could go on, but you get the point. Our young'uns are bad, but they're
not _that_ bad.

my two cents
-Sue Gallagher
sgallagher -at- akonix -dot- com


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