TechECE

At most times, the problems in writing a good blog, article or essay are more rhetorical than grammatical. Most of us are aware of the grammatical structures (S+V+C, S+V+IO+DO) and familiar with the commonly used words and their spellings (Who said so?! I was generous in lending another 'm' to the word 'coming' (comming) until Nitya corrected me last year!!); Even otherwise, in case of grammatical mistakes, there are hard and fast rules that draw a thick line between what is correct and what is wrong. If one has good memory, grammatical mistakes should be hardly a problem. In general, a problem becomes complex only when you have multiple choices. That's exactly what one will encounter in deciding their writing style. As a writer one must determine what style would suit to express his thoughts with greater clarity and cogency. In doing so, he should take into account various other parameters as well. For instance, the style that suits a formal writing ( say, writing an essay) may not suit an informal writing (say writing a blog).

At a high level, the steps in determining the 'style of writing' may be broken into steps as

1) creating an appropriate voice for one's purpose,
2) choosing the right words for the subject and audience,
3) constructing elegant sentences whose rhythm reinforces their meaning,
4) presenting an argument in a logical fashion that is both engaging and easy to follow,
5) finding vivid images to make thoughts accessible to the readers.

As discussed earlier, all these steps have to be decided dynamically and cannot be generalized. One has to reconceive all these rules/steps before starting to write. Below are some of the common mistakes that one makes in writing a blog.

In case of writing technical documents like specification or design, active voice is considered the most effective style. The guidelines for those documents suggest to use 'Active Voice' because passive voices are generally wordy and hence result in ambiguous statements. But it doesn't mean that we should always follow active voice in our writing.

There are a number of places where passive voice would suit better.

1) Where the subject is not known.
Egs: The car was thrashed.

2) When one wants to hide the subject. This is probably the best use of passive voice. We software engineers tend to use this quite often than not.
Egs: The document was written ambiguously. (by whom?!)

3) When one wants to create a suspense (like an anchor in an award ceremony).
Egs: Centum in CAT 2006 was achieved by...Pradeep Sundaram, the GCT 'peter'.

4) When one wants to write a technical document or research paper.
Egs: The experiment was performed at 0'C. - PAssive
I performed the experiment at 0'C - Active

5) In some cases, passive voice will help to maintain a good flow and preserve coherence.

But in general, the key in writing clearly and concisely is to use strong active verbs. This means that you should only use the passive voice when you have a solid reason for doing so.

Parallelism:

This is the most common mistake that most of us do. Let us take a common sentence - "Democracy is the government by the people, of the people and for the people." Each part of the sentence maintains the same grammatical form. Sentences that do not follow this rule like "She had a strong liking to read books and for playing tennis." should be avoided at any cost.

Redundancy:

Redundnacy is also another common mistake that most of us make. "Revert back", "close proximity" are some of the phrases that we use in our blogs often. But sometimes in case of informal writing, we do use it willingly to add more style to our writing. I don't find anything wrong with it either, as long as it doesn't look odd.

Wordiness:

Many have a tendency to write more than what is required. We not only waste our time in writing those extra words but also waste the time of the reader. By the way, why would the reader want to read more pages than required to gather the information?! If there is an opportunity to convey the same content with less number of words, we should prefer it (doesn't it sound analogous with code optimization). Also, usage of more words means there are more chances to commit grammatical mistakes and more chances to deviate away from the topic (Ain't this sentence wordy?!). But sometimes, we may want the sentence to be wordy to stress our point. For instance, consider the following passage from a speech by Winston Churchill during world war II. It could certainly be made shorter with fewer repetitions, but it would hardly be more inspiring:

"We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender."

A certain amount of repetition and redundancy has its uses.

Many a times, I have observed that girls have a better command over their communication skills be it oral or written than guys. Guys always stand second when it comes to English vocabulary. It is quite a common to see emails or blogs written by guys with lot of grammatical and spelling mistakes. What could be the reason for such a vast difference in this aspect between the two sects of the homo-sapiens?! Not sure if books like "Men are from Mars, women are from Venus" talk about this?! But, one thing is for sure, an average girl has much better communication skills than an average guy.

The subject "English" is given the least importance in our education system. When it comes to engineering or medical admissions, marks in English are not given that much importance comparing other technical subjects. So, most of the guys, even the toppers pay least attention to English because it would never fetch them their seat in their dream college. Then, how could girls have a better control over English given that all these arguments apply to girls as well. I could relate this argument to the rare quality that swan has; Swan is very intelligent that it is able to segregate milk from water, and drink only milk. The same applies to guys. Guys are so good that they are able to recognize what they want when they read something. They concentrate more on the concept than the words and sentences which just acts as a medium to understand the concept. I guess many would accept the fact that guys score better than girls when it comes to problem solving and concept understanding; Guys top the entrance tests, where the understanding of the concept plays a major role and girls top the higher secondary exams, where it requires good english and just vomiting the contents that is in the book. Of course, everything in the world has exceptions.

In this context, I am reminded of a theory - Wavelet Transforms. When one applies wavelet transformation on an image, it separates the image content into two classes - coarse and fine data. The corse data contain the overall outline of the image. The fine data, contains the other details that add more clarity to the image. If your aim is to just recognize the image, in most of the cases it would suffice if we just have the coarse details of the image. Coming to the context, guys have a tendancy to concentrate on the coarse details, which is the most wanted to solve the purpose and pay least attention to the less important details. Girls on the other hand are more interested in the finer details. This probably explains why girls are interested in least important stuffs like makeups, ornaments, jewels, fancy stuffs, et al. Guys will never find those fancy gimmicks interesting. I am not arrogant, if I say that English is always that fancy gimmick as far as an Engineering or a medical student is concerned.

I planned to spend just half an hour on this and this is the last second I hav...