ffeathers — a technical writer’s blog

Documentation answers all the big questions of life: How did I get here? What’s it all about? How do I do it? What’s next?

This leads to the inescapable conclusion that documentation is at the centre of the life, the universe and everything.

Even if all it says is: ‘Wrong way — go back’.

I’ve just acquired a Laptop Lap Desk. It’s a cool accessory. Lap heat rash is now a thing of the past

But this blog post is not about the Lap Desk. It’s the packaging which caught my fancy. Take a look at the Australian distributor’s trademark:

First law of commerce: Make sure they know who you are.

Second law of anything: Have fun while you’re doing it.

At university, I studied English with a strong emphasis on linguistics. This week a colleague at work, after reading my recent blog posts about language, let me know that she had studied linguistics too. So why are we both now in Information Technology (IT)? Also, John R made a thought-provoking comment. So now I’m following up on those two comments. And at the end, I’ll tell you how my trees are doing.

First of all, exactly why is this sentence funny or at least quirky: “Drive carefully when wet”?

Secondly, John R’s comment got me to thinking about how, with my fascination for linguistics, I ended up in IT. What makes a technical writer tick, and is the tick-mechanism anything like the widget that powers a systems engineer? Do John R (a self-professed ‘computationist’) and I (a linguaphile) actually share a habit of putting brackets around things and even indulging in the odd XOR?

Linguists have spent a lot of time trying to describe the knowledge common to speakers of a particular language. Without a shared knowledge, we wouldn’t be able to communicate. Some linguists think that there’s even an innate structural understanding shared by all humans, irrespective of which language they speak. So our brains come pre-wired with the “deep structural” rules of language, and we just have to plug in the specific language we need.

It seems fairly obvious that a language has a structure, and that all speakers of the language are able to manipulate the structure to produce unique, never-before spoken sentences with amazing ease. But describing the structure and its ability to generate new sentences has proved quite tricky.

Still, there’s hope. Take our sentence “Drive carefully when wet”. You might represent it like this:

Read the diagram starting from the top: A sentence (S) may consist of a noun phrase (NP) and a verb phrase (VP). A noun phrase may consist of a pronoun (Pro). A verb phrase may consist of a verb (V) plus an adverb (Adv) plus another sentence. And so on.

Linguists have also created a way to describe phrase-structure rules, complete with brackets and symbols to keep computationists happy. For example:

• S –> NP VP (A sentence may consist of a noun phrase and a verb phrase)
• NP –> Pro (A noun phrase may consist of a pronoun)
• And so on.

And then you can add other logistical provisions, like:

• “You” deletion: In an imperative sentence (i.e. a command), omit the “you”.
• Pronoun matching: The second pronoun, also missing in our sentence, is assumed to be the same as the first pronoun.

……So…… that’s why it’s funny. Get it?

The design of computer languages, and other artificial languages, owes much to the work of linguists. Chomsky, in particular, is an easy mark. He’s the man everyone loves to shoot down. But his work on the theory of a universal grammar, transformational-generative grammars, the Chomsky hierarchy and the Chomsky normal form set the basis for much of what we do today.

So that may be why my colleague and I, linguists both, found our way into IT.

I think there are probably two sorts (or more ) of people. Those like me, who seem to organise things into groups automatically (yeah, those brackets). The groupings are fluid and flexible, but the fact remains that we like them to be there. And then there are the people who float much more freely in their ecosystems: go with the flow, synchronicity rocks, hey man what’s the odd misplaced pronoun between friends?

Sometimes it amazes me how many different world views there are out there, just walking down the street next to me. And that we actually do manage to communicate with each other!

Moving on to my two trees:

Two months ago, I planted two trees. I promised a progress report every now and then. The trees are about the same age as this blog. And they’re doing great.

Here’s the paperbark, now 50cm high. (Was 40cm on 1 September.)

Here’s the old man banksia, now 32cm. (Was 17cm on 1 September.)

Here’s the answer to the question posted in a previous blog:

Jack, where John had had “had”, had had “had had”. “Had had” had had the teacher’s approval.

Tangentially…

Coming home on the bus one day this week, I had a blinding flash of inspiration. This one’s for John R, who prefers computation to punctuation.

Add up the vital statistics of the answer given above:

So, in an awesomely insignificant way, the answer to the question is 42. As indeed it should be.

(Please note that this calculation uses base 10, not base 13.)

A traffic signboard in Cape Town, South Africa, says:

Drive carefully when wet

Does that make you roll on the floor laughing? Then you just might be technical writer material

Two happenings this week made me think along these lines.

Firstly, a couple of people asked me about technical writing, why it’s fun (i.e. how can it possibly be fun), and what sort of (odd) people enjoy it.

Secondly, someone was raving about Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves, bringing back my own fond memories of the book. It’s all about the importance of punctuation and how we’d be a far sorrier species without the judicious insertion of a comma here and there.

It’d be really interesting to know how many technical writers are also ensnared by every passing bit of wordplay. Believe it or not, there are some people who would pass by the ‘when wet’ traffic sign without a giggle. And there are even some who wouldn’t know what to do with a semicolon if it came up behind them in a dark alley.

What about crossword puzzles: I wonder how many technical writers are also avid cruciverbalists? I’m not, but a colleague of mine is an expert. Here’s a tantaliser for you. This is a picture of an insert I found with my new curtains from Lincraft:

Does that send you racing for your dictionary? Or even better, do you already know what slubs and knubs are?

Here’s a riddle:

Why was 6 afraid of 7?

Because 7 8 9.

Do you think that’s very cute or does it leave you cold?

And here’s something my whimsical English lecturer many years ago asked the class. It stuck like superglue in my head, and I wonder how many others of that year still remember it:

How do you explain to non-English speakers that we chop a tree down and then proceed to chop it up?

If you’ve got this far in this blog post, you’re tickled by this sort of thing too. I’ll leave you with a puzzle. How would you use punctuation and capitalisation to make sense of the following sequence of words?

Jack where John had had had had had had had had had had had the teacher’s approval

I’ll post the answer next week, unless someone beats me to it.