What has made you more comfortable with your writing, or eager to improve what you've written?
First of all, I find it sad when a writing teacher categorically dismisses rules of grammar and spelling because it "can't be fixed it in a semester." I'm not talking about diagramming sentences and recasting verbs in the past pluperfect conjunctive. I'm talking about simple mistakes with homonyms, apostrophes, comma placement, and spelling. These mistakes are acceptable in junior-high writing; in college writing or business writing, they will torpedo credibility faster than anything else the writer does.
Since you're working with engineers who get paid to sweat the details, spend a week on cleaning up common grammatical mistakes. You may be the first person to clearly and simply describe how to do the basics correctly. If you don't like teaching grammar because you find it dull, boring, and awful, then be up front about it. But don't pretend it's not an important basic writing skill, or delude yourself into thinking that your students don't need to know it.
Others have already commented on structure and its relation to content. My take is that you should spend up to half of your alloted writing time working on an outline. Your engineering students are used to breaking down big problems into smaller ones, and figuring out how to solve the small problems one at a time. Spend at least a week learning how to outline topics. There are a couple basic outlines that everyone can use: problem / cause / solution, past / present / future. Work with each of these. You can also use thesis / antithesis / synthesis, though this starts to go off into hypothetical, squishy areas that can't be readily outlined by engineers.
Your students should spend several weeks on voice. Active voice should be used in nearly all writing. It is cleaner, smoother, and easier to read. Others have commented on clean sentence structure and I won't repeat their advice.
Optionally, but strongly recommended, is giving a presentation to a small group. Forget the standing in front of the whole class with a projector; let students present to a small group of four or five other students. Only one activity is forbidden: reading verbatim from a document or set of slides. Anything else goes. Most engineers will face peer critique at some point in their careers, and learning how to present information and take suggestions back is critical.
These people were not interfering with store operations; in fact, they went out of their way *not* to interfere. The only people interfering with store operations were the managers overreacting. The best overreactions are the manager protesting her violation of her "civil rights" and the manager surreptitiously attempting to photograph the improv artists. Bureacracies are built for mockery because they take themselves so seriously.
By the way, I like how you equate "different" with "dangerous." That speaks volumes about your outlook on life.
You're right about leaving software as "greyware" rather than going through the motions of resurrecting OOP games. As noted by others further in the thread, the hoops that potentially need to be jumped through preclude most game publishers from expending the effort for zero gain. Unless a publisher was two guys in a garage, it's just not likely that a shell corporation (or inheritor of the IP) will want to legally release the games.
This really sucks, because in an ideal world the fans with fond memories of games will freely spend their own time and effort updating and maintaining the games, long after the hope of making a profit has evaporated for the parent corporation. But a corporation lives to do just one thing: make a profit for its shareholders, and anything that smacks of "free" is anathema.
--snip--
gotten a new CEO soon to loot your company and run (I experienced this... once I experienced a half million loss in options and 401K it was hard to like what my company had become when the CEO walked away with $500M)
--snip--
Ah yes, the famed "Hollywood Bob" Palmer of Digital Equipment Corp. I was there for that fiasco too. There should be a special hell on earth for people like him.
On a more topical note, DEC was noteworthy for being a company builty by and for IT nerds. It was also noteworthy for having the most Byzantine internal processes for getting anything done. IT can design something that works fine without end-user input, but as end users write the checks, IT *must* show some kind of value or the end users will revolt. Reshaping IT to fit the management whim of the moment doesn't work -- it just wrecks things further.
Re:It's not me, it's everyone else!
on
Uwe Boll Smash!
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· Score: 1
Hadn't seen that PA cartoon. Most excellent. Thank you for posting it, Adam!
It's not me, it's everyone else!
on
Uwe Boll Smash!
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
My BS detector goes off whenever there are excuses for everything, and the excuses are always someone else's fault. "People don't understand my movies, game studios didn't back me up, game journalists slant everything, the haters are out to get me...."
It reminds me of a saying: Just because no one understands you, it doesn't mean you're a genius.
Slashdot Mirror
Since you're working with engineers who get paid to sweat the details, spend a week on cleaning up common grammatical mistakes. You may be the first person to clearly and simply describe how to do the basics correctly. If you don't like teaching grammar because you find it dull, boring, and awful, then be up front about it. But don't pretend it's not an important basic writing skill, or delude yourself into thinking that your students don't need to know it.
Others have already commented on structure and its relation to content. My take is that you should spend up to half of your alloted writing time working on an outline. Your engineering students are used to breaking down big problems into smaller ones, and figuring out how to solve the small problems one at a time. Spend at least a week learning how to outline topics. There are a couple basic outlines that everyone can use: problem / cause / solution, past / present / future. Work with each of these. You can also use thesis / antithesis / synthesis, though this starts to go off into hypothetical, squishy areas that can't be readily outlined by engineers.
Your students should spend several weeks on voice. Active voice should be used in nearly all writing. It is cleaner, smoother, and easier to read. Others have commented on clean sentence structure and I won't repeat their advice.
Optionally, but strongly recommended, is giving a presentation to a small group. Forget the standing in front of the whole class with a projector; let students present to a small group of four or five other students. Only one activity is forbidden: reading verbatim from a document or set of slides. Anything else goes. Most engineers will face peer critique at some point in their careers, and learning how to present information and take suggestions back is critical.
Good luck.
These people were not interfering with store operations; in fact, they went out of their way *not* to interfere. The only people interfering with store operations were the managers overreacting. The best overreactions are the manager protesting her violation of her "civil rights" and the manager surreptitiously attempting to photograph the improv artists. Bureacracies are built for mockery because they take themselves so seriously. By the way, I like how you equate "different" with "dangerous." That speaks volumes about your outlook on life.
You're right about leaving software as "greyware" rather than going through the motions of resurrecting OOP games. As noted by others further in the thread, the hoops that potentially need to be jumped through preclude most game publishers from expending the effort for zero gain. Unless a publisher was two guys in a garage, it's just not likely that a shell corporation (or inheritor of the IP) will want to legally release the games. This really sucks, because in an ideal world the fans with fond memories of games will freely spend their own time and effort updating and maintaining the games, long after the hope of making a profit has evaporated for the parent corporation. But a corporation lives to do just one thing: make a profit for its shareholders, and anything that smacks of "free" is anathema.
--snip-- gotten a new CEO soon to loot your company and run (I experienced this... once I experienced a half million loss in options and 401K it was hard to like what my company had become when the CEO walked away with $500M) --snip-- Ah yes, the famed "Hollywood Bob" Palmer of Digital Equipment Corp. I was there for that fiasco too. There should be a special hell on earth for people like him. On a more topical note, DEC was noteworthy for being a company builty by and for IT nerds. It was also noteworthy for having the most Byzantine internal processes for getting anything done. IT can design something that works fine without end-user input, but as end users write the checks, IT *must* show some kind of value or the end users will revolt. Reshaping IT to fit the management whim of the moment doesn't work -- it just wrecks things further.
Hadn't seen that PA cartoon. Most excellent. Thank you for posting it, Adam!
My BS detector goes off whenever there are excuses for everything, and the excuses are always someone else's fault. "People don't understand my movies, game studios didn't back me up, game journalists slant everything, the haters are out to get me...." It reminds me of a saying: Just because no one understands you, it doesn't mean you're a genius.