Jyoti Sanyal's Book and Technical Writers

Jyoti Sanyal was a former assistant editor and columnist for The Statesman. His book, Indlish, is an excellent guide to how Indians should use contemporary English.

The book is an essential read for those in a writing career, including technical writers and journalists. The author identifies the four "grey" areas Indians fail to rectify in their writing. He also provides examples and tips on how these gaps can be plugged.

The following grey areas pinpointed by Sanyal in his book applies to technical writing as well:

Syntax: A primary reason why overseas clients dub Indian technical writing as bad is the writer's abject failure to understand the English syntax. Very few has a good understanding of the sentence structure and rules that govern sentence structure. Very few spend time to learn how English is used all over the world. Most of them consider writing long sentences as equivalent to their mastery over English. Technical writers argue with editors saying that a "sentence can be written in multiple ways." Unfortunately, they do not realise that the syntax in English is more rigid than Indian languages and there is no room for individual flexibility.

Noun and verb usage: Sanyal says that in Indian languages nouns are primary, while in English verbs are the most important ones. It is a matter of debate whether techncial writers really know the difference between the two.

Passive Voice: Writing in active voice is not restricted to technical writing. For more immediate and direct communication, active voice was always preferred. Active voice is the antidote to pompous writing that characterised the Victorian era and the British Raj.

Punctuation: Technical writing by non-native writers abound in punctuation errors, especially the comma. For a few, ignorance leads to errors, while for others learning is simply absent. While today's newspapers contribute a lot to perpetuating this evil, writers often think that they are free to violate the punctuation rules.

Sanyal says that while English retained the speech forms, Indian languages adopted the roundabout way of Sanskrit. Redundancy, pompousness, and passive sentences rule Indian languages, even though vernacular writers have moved away from passive voice to active voice. Our newspapers refuse to learn this and techncial writers do not like being told the ugly truth.

Norman Borlaug and environmentalists

It is interesting that the obituaries of Norman Borlaug contained barbs directed at environmentalists who have critcised his brand of intensive farming. While it is true that India benefitted from his "green revolution", the fact is that it was not just the lack of food that caused famines in India. It is for the historians to correct the notion in the western media that "famine and poverty" are always associated with the history of India.

Somebody should correct the misinformation that India's progress is just a deceptive story, waiting to be dug out by western news and infotainment channels.

 

I found the Scientific American obituary a more balanced one, compared to others who portrayed Borlaug as an ardent supporter of GE crops and genetic engineering.

 

 

Behind Science Fiction

Buoyed by Keith Solty's posts on science fiction, I was reading a bit of SF today. I started by reading a few stories and then downloaded Karl Schroeder's Crisis in Zefra.

While SF has not been my favourite genre, I still remember a lecture I listened to a few years back. It was delivered by a well-known scientist as part of a science journalism workshop. The one-hour lecture was well presented and as a listener I was busy scribbling names of the authors I have not read. The list I prepared is still with me and my job is still unfinished.

Reading Solty's tag on SF led me to Ted Chiang's wikipedia page. Ted is a technical writer who has written 'speculatiev fiction'. Well, that sounded interesting. This discovery on a dull, cloudy Saturday has forced me to look for Ted's free SF stuff on the net. Looks good!

PS: Read a few poems by Robert Penn Warren. I tried using Google images to really understand the 'depth' of the imagery in poems. That experience was interesting.