The English Language as an IT tool (2006)

The English Language as an IT tool 

By Tatiana Andronache, I.S.P.

Published in ComputerWorld Canada 2006

“Grace, no execution”, the emperor decided. But his handlers wrote the order down as “Grace no, execution”. The emperor signed without a second look, and a head rolled needlessly because of a misplaced comma. Or so the story goes. In our era, we are more than ever under the tyranny of words, commas, dashes, slashes and dots - in our invented languages as well as in our natural ones.

Experts tell us time and again to watch our grammar and spelling on resumes if we want to have a chance at that coveted IT position. Or so the story goes. Why is it that once that perfectly spelled resume has landed its author the targeted position, all of a sudden spelling, clarity and style become the Cinderella of the IT profession?

Maybe resumes do get turned down because of this kind of flaws, but the same rarely happens with technical writing. When was the last time you or your boss tossed a specification into the paper bin because poor grammar or style tipped off that the author might be equally ill-at-ease with the technical problems that were the subject matter of the offending document?

These misdeeds are often swept under the rug but they do come with a price tag. I was once in a meeting in which a team had to review a business specification for an application enhancement. The meeting had been scheduled for one hour. It lasted for three painful hours, because the team was stumbling over each paragraph: verbosity, ambiguity and an avalanche of bullets conspired to hide the meaning of those phrases. UML might be king in academic circles, but English is still the preferred and most used tool in the field when it comes to communication between business users and developers. I have recently heard a tool vendor trying to score points for his product based on the fact that the product uses plain English, not UML, in order to capture requirements.

Yet proficiency in English is not a requirement for professional survival past the HR gates. and it is not required for certification in IT. In Canada, the I.S.P. designation (Information System Professional), the only vendor-independent certification, does not include proficiency in written and/or spoken English, despite the fact that many applicants are professionals for whom English is a second language. Many positions in IT call for “excellent communication skills”, but this looks like a must only at the ends of the spectrum: help-desk and management positions. The majority of developers, testers, analysts, and various other specialists can do with whatever level of proficiency they are at, with little incentive or pressure to improve.

This is a sorry state of the art. In the short run, it means just a lot of minor frustrations, because in our tolerant and diverse professional climate, co-workers will put up with mispronounced or misspelled words and twisted phrases, as long as they are still able to figure out the overall meaning of what is being communicated. But empirical evidence shows that unclear language and poorly written documents are responsible to some extent for additional costs related to misinterpretation of requirements and faulty code. And well documented studies show that challenging the meaning of a faulty English phrase is much cheaper than having to go all the way to development and test until a piece of code is proven faulty.

In the long run, the passivity towards poor language skills legitimates that level of proficiency as acceptable; then, it will become the norm. This is already happening: I pointed out the misuse of the word “principal” to an independent media consultant, native speaker of English. The context of the offending phrase in her text was clearly indicating that “principle” was what she should have used. But until I pressed open the Oxford dictionary in front of her, she wouldn’t concede or was simply unaware of the misuse. The misuse had become the norm through silent acceptance over the years. I’ve also seen a case of reverse misuse of this challenging word: an IT consultant with a position of Principal, used the word “Principle” in his email closing – to a somewhat comic effect. (Yes, “effect”, not “affect”!)

If we agree that English is an IT tool, then we should treat it as such; when we come across its (not “it’s”) misusage it’s our professional duty to decide “Grace – no. Execution!”

https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2010/12/13/09/51/dictionary-1799__340.jpg