Teaching Engineers to Write?

Teaching Engineers to Write?: "I worked at Bell Labs after college, and a critical piece of required training was a writing course. I don't remember who ran it, probably some outside teaching firm, but it was really really valuable to me. A couple of the critical lessons
Write like a newspaper reporter, not a grad student.
Your objective is clear communication to the reader, not beauty or eruditeness or narration of your discoveries and reasoning process. Don't waste their time, or at least don't waste it up front.

Hit the important conclusions in the first few sentences so your reader will read them. If you'd like to wrap up with them at the end of your memo, that's fine too, in case anybody's still reading by then, but conclusions come first.

If you're trying to express something complex, simplify your writing so it doesn't get in the way. For something simple, 10th grade language structures will do, but if it's really hairy stuff, back down to 8th grade or so.
(Yes! Now the engineers get to play with grammatical analysis tools and run them on their documents, which was a really cool thing back in the just-after-punchcards days :-)
Think about what your audience knows and doesn't know, and what they want and don't want. Express things in terms of what they know and want, not what _you_ know.

If you want somebody to do something, tell them specifically. The passive voice indicates that things will or should be or were done, and may optionally refer to who they might be or have been done by - in business, it's perfectly ok to tell people that you want them to do stuff, and politely expressing the valuableness of the acheivement of doneness of stuff not only doesn't tell the person you want to do stuff to do it, it often leads to later arguments about responsibili"

Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed: Rules for Bootstrappers

Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed: Rules for Bootstrappers: "Greg Gianforte of RightNow did a useful presentation at the recent MySQL conference on rules for boostrapping your business. It is, welcomingly, not just some anti-VC diatribe, nor is it some up-with-Web-2.0 moonshine. Instead, the presentation is a fair, reasoned, and practical look at the implications for companies that decide to go it financially alone -- alone, that is, except for check-writing customers."