Comment by raganwald | Hacker News Reader

Comment by raganwald | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps a bit OT, but... The post seemed to be riddled with formatting and grammar errors. This rubbed my old-school English sensibilities at first, but then I began to enjoy its rough feel.

After all, it's a post about how people who worked tirelessly to bring a product to market were shipping things while the rest of Microsoft slept. The story very clearly describes a dichotomy in Microsoft's culture between process/rules/superficial quality on the one hand and relentlessly shortening the ship/fix cycle on the other.

This post is not just about shortened ship/fix cycles, it is itself an example of a shortened write/fix cycle.

When that struck me, the style of post suddenly "clicked:" It was as if I was reading an email that was furiously blasted out to Posterous while the author's compiler worked, and thereafter there was no time for extensive editing and proofing by a circle of reviewers. What mattered was to get the idea out and to start the conversation, editing and polish would follow later.

Great stuff!

I'm highly tolerant of spelling/grammar errors, normally. Who cares about "it's" vs. "its" in this context, right? But in this case, I needed to re-read every sentence. Even after re-reading it a few times, I had to guess the author's intended meaning. That is just a failure to communicate.

Really? I did not notice any ambiguity. Can you give an example?

I could not figure out "(Don't be evil, was a joke?)".

I read it as an offhand comment to the effect of: remember when people at Microsoft thought that "Don't be evil" (and Google in general) was a joke?

"Let me say that again: Attacking a market incumbent on an area of it's core strength - It's hardest in technology companies."

I'm the author of this post and by no means I expected this to be on the top of HN today. It was a surprise. I din't do any good editing on this, since it was my personal blog and I had sent to Michael Arrington, who wanted to edit/publish it. For some reason, he backed out at the last moment and it din't make it to TC. Welcome to the world of citizen journalism.

Sorry about the typos/errors. I'm looking into this now :)

Was this get modified? I didn't notice anything reading through.

English is his second language and the grammar mistakes weren't a big deal for me.Some of the over-the-top language (especially in his recruiting post yesterday :) was.

imo the post essentially says that the people he liked at Bing were all great. He then goes to suggest that the departure of all these great people (presumably including him) is equivalent to the death of Bing. He also chooses to indict unnamed "professional managers" while praising several other individuals (and managers) by name

Prasanna says that he is surprised to see his post at the "top of HN today". However, imo there is nothing surprising about a Microsoft-bashing post being on the front page:).

It's one of those very, very scarce texts where mild swearing adds something. 99 out of 100 times, it's just deteriorating the post quality and signs of bad writership.

Indeed. Saying "Michael fucking Burrows" made me look him up (as intended, I guess :) )

"Michael Burrows (born circa 1963) is widely known as the creator of the Burrows/Wheeler transform. He also was, with Louis Monier, one of the two main creators of AltaVista" (which I guess was the point!). He ironically now works to Google according to Wikipedia.

He is also an author of the Google Bigtable (http://labs.google.com/papers/bigtable.html) and Chubby (http://labs.google.com/papers/chubby.html) papers.

In university, we had to read one of his earlier papers, Eraser (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.22.3...).

I assume English is not his first language, as he also just made a job posting (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2422799) which has the same errors such as "din't".

din't is easily a sticky key or a fast-typing error. It happens to any of us and doesn't necessarily say that the person has a separate first language.

Furthermore, even though it's good form to read over a message you're sending and remove the typoes, grammar-os and other such issues, it doesn't always happen :)

It's too consistent to be a typo. It appears twice in the article, twice in one of his comments here and once in his job posting.

> What mattered was to get the idea out and to start the conversation, editing and polish would follow later.

On the other hand, careless writing shows that the author places little value on his thoughts, for if he thought them important he would spend a little more time on their delivery, ensuring the contents don't get destroyed in the process.

I believe the truth is as follows:

You infer from careless writing that the author places little value on his thoughts, because if you were writing them and you thought them important, you would spend a little more time on their delivery.

Indeed that is true, but it is also true that if you are writing things for other people to read, then what value those other people put on your delivery is more important than what value you put on your delivery.

If you are writing only for yourself, then things like grammar and spelling are less important because, presumably, you know what you meant. However, if you want other people to value what you write, grammar and spelling become very important.

First, because poor grammar and spelling sabotage your meaning and delivery. There were several sentences in the article where I had to stop and think "err... what is he trying to say?" It is entirely likely I misinterpreted the meaning of some of these sentences. The fact that the author understood and valued those sentences is of utterly no help to me.

Second, there are people who believe confusing and ungrammatical writing are symptoms of confused and unknowledgeable writers. I understand you may not agree with this but, again, if you are writing for other people then it is the other person's impressions you must consider, not your own.

Defending ungrammatical writing by challenging a reader's inferences and thoughts is not convincing because, if you are writing for other readers, it is precisely those inferences and thoughts you should be addressing.

Indeed. The coherent thought that this post was put up with and that it communicated, more than made up for grammar and formatting errors.

Perhaps, the reason there were all these errors in the first place was because it was written in _that movement_ when one has a "quantum of thought"

I don't see how the grammatical errors could have arose simply from writing a rough first draft of a blog post. It seems like the writer has little experience in the way of English grammar.

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