Mind Your Language

We engineers are the masters of the language of mathematics but when it comes to the language for interpersonal communication many of us are found wanting. Today's interconnected world allows people from across borders and time zones to co-ordinate and work together which surely is possible only because of engineering advances in the telecommunications technology yet the very central point in communication remains that of conveying your message. Well, we engineers are working very hard to improve the channel of communication so that whatever is said/written is transmitted across instantaneously with highest clarity to any corner of the world but what if the message doesn't reach that corner of the intended brain where it is supposed to? It ends up being a very clear 'noise' signal.

#-Link-Snipped-#Many of these clear noise signals are generated because of lack of command over language. English which is most widely spoken language of business allows most of us to communicate in a common language but even with English speaking engineers there are problems. What we write can have two entirely different set of interpretations. I would like to quote from a communications session that once attended. The instructor was demonstrating the importance of punctuation and how it can change the meaning of the entire message. The instructor wrote a set of words on the board. The words read "Woman without her man is incomplete" prompting murmurs in the crowd especially among the members of the fairer sex. Then the instructor just added a couple of punctuation marks to make the statement as "Woman! - without her, man is incomplete." prompting loud applause (from both men and women). So there are nuances in languages that we just tend to forget. If you just take my own posts many of them might convey something else when I actually want to convey something different and the reason - choice of words.

Well the point here is not about usage of correct English. The point is of understanding the importance of language for an engineer. Yes we don't need to have the level of articulation that an author would need but an engineer should at least be 'linguistic enough' to express herself clearly and to write great posts on CrazyEngineers.

Also, Lets not just restrict ourselves to English. German, French, Spanish,Chinese, Japanese all are great languages and pose great challenges to their learners. Lets try to make learning easier for each other by sharing tips here with each other. Let me make a start by sharing a great website to learn spanish - www.spanishdict.org.