Don’t assume the obvious

[Diane CarneyModerator @dianecarney30678]

In general I believe we have very high standards when it comes to
the use of English. As you know, I am not a practising model engineer so
if something in a manuscript is unclear to me I would have to query it
to make sure it isn’t a mistake. I would mark it for David to check. I
vaguely remember the ‘PB’ but I seem to recall that in that case I
worked it out for myself pretty quickly so therefore decided that if I
could understand, then the reader could too. I agree, however, that in
such cases it would be best practice to write out in full followed by
the abbreviation in the first instance and I it would be my suggestion that we do this in future. (In fact, are you sure that didn’t happen in this article?)

 

As an editor can never read anything without mentally
editing it I have to say that there are a lot of publications in the
railway and preservation fields with much lower standards than ours. It’s a bit cynical to suggest that nothing in print is ever edited these days. All in all I think ME and MEW are pretty good in terms of standards of English.

Diane

[Steve GarnettParticipant @stevegarnett62550]

Posted by Diane Carney on 31/07/2011 20:48:06:

 

As an editor can never read anything without mentally editing it I have to say that there are a lot of publications in the railway and preservation fields with much lower standards than ours. It’s a bit cynical to suggest that nothing in print is ever edited these days. All in all I think ME and MEW are pretty good in terms of standards of English.

 

Oh, this is absolutely true. I can’t speak about ME, but over the last year or so MEW’s English has improved considerably. In fairness it wasn’t too bad before, but appearances of apostrophes where they shouldn’t be (it seems that the distinction between its and it’s isn’t common knowledge!) used to be almost ubiquitous, and there are very few things indeed in recent issues that would deserve grammatical comment, apart from the odd missing comma…

 

Commas are useful, and very important in terms of non-confusion. Consider:

 

The report said Diane Carney was wrong.

The report, said Diane Carney, was wrong.

 

Obviously being Diane, she’d have been right either way around, but hey, I’m sure you get the point!

 

 

[Clive HartlandParticipant @clivehartland94829]

There has been a distinct ‘dumming down’ of english and grammar for some years. Spelling is a clear example.

Dont ever ask for a handwritten CV because you will end up reading at 45 degrees as you come to the bottom of it.

Spidery writing slowly slanting down the page as you read of outward bound course and that the subject was ‘Akela’ in the scouts!

When in the army I was seconded to the Recruiting Office opposite Charing Cross station in London and one of the first things I was told, ‘Get them to write their name and address on the form’.

Sure enough the first lot came in and then they left when they could not write the required name and address, they could not read or write!

I find a lot of young people are numerically disenchanted and cannot do mental arithmetic or carry out simple calculations without a calculator.

Further to this is a complete lack of knowedge of fractions and conversion of same to decimal.

There is also the lack of knowledge of Imperial measurements which in engineering are a must.

As for understanding a juvenile text message then I am dumb!

 

Clive

[Gone AwayParticipant @goneaway]

Posted by Steve Garnett on 31/07/2011 21:35:06:

over the last year or so MEW’s English has improved considerably. In fairness it wasn’t too bad before, but appearances of apostrophes where they shouldn’t be (it seems that the distinction between its and it’s isn’t common knowledge!) used to be almost ubiquitous,

 

What then do we make of the tile “Model Engineers’ Workshop”? Is it  a single workshop for multiple model engineers? (I presume it’s the magazine itself that is being described as the “workshop”).

 

Regarding the abbreviations for the term “stainless steel”, many engineers frown on that term altogether since it isn’t (stainless), preferring “corrosion resistant steel”. Unfortunately that often gets abbreviated as “CRS” (cold rolled steel anyone?) rather than the preferred “CRES”

 

Edited By Sid Herbage on 31/07/2011 22:58:20

Edited By Sid Herbage on 31/07/2011 22:58:44

[John Stevenson 1Participant @johnstevenson1]

Posted by Clive Hartland on 31/07/2011 21:57:53:

Further to this is a complete lack of knowledge of fractions and conversion of same to decimal.

Clive

 

That’s got to be an improvement then, been in the trade for 315 years, man and boy and never seen a machine tool with fractions on the dial.

 

Hate the bloody things, who can understand what 43/64 th’s is ? I was immensely pleased when we moved to decimal even though I was brought up on imperial.

17.07mm can only be 17.07mm. It is never shown as a fraction of a metre.

 

John S.

[Diane CarneyModerator @dianecarney30678]

I wonder whether you mean 31.5 years, John?

 

Diane

 

[John Stevenson 1Participant @johnstevenson1]

No 315 Dianne, it’s been a long time……………………………:D

 

John S.

[blowlampParticipant @blowlamp]

Posted by Steve Garnett on 31/07/2011 21:35:06:

 

Oh, this is absolutely true. I can’t speak about ME, but over the last year or so MEW’s English has improved considerably. In fairness it wasn’t too bad before, but appearances of apostrophes where they shouldn’t be (it seems that the distinction between its and it’s isn’t common knowledge!) used to be almost ubiquitous, and there are very few things indeed in recent issues that would deserve grammatical comment, apart from the odd missing comma…

 

Commas are useful, and very important in terms of non-confusion. Consider:

 

The report said Diane Carney was wrong.

The report, said Diane Carney, was wrong.

 

Obviously being Diane, she’d have been right either way around, but hey, I’m sure you get the point!

 

 

Steve.

Whilst I agree with you and others about punctuation etc, the objective is to have one’s point understood.

So with that in mind, I’m not at all sure that everyone would understand the subtlety of the second line of your example, in its present form.

 

I would have been inclined to rearrange the wording to something like:

 

Diane Carne said “The report was wrong”.

 

Which should help to avoid confusion, but if you were to insist on the current layout, then maybe:

 

“The report”, said Diane Carney, “was wrong”.

 

May help the reader (me, at least) to understand the intention better.

 

 

Martin.

[Gray62Participant @gray62]

Having worked as a technical author for many years in military service, one of the principles we adhered to was to preceed any abreviations with a fully worded description.

i.e Cold Rolled Mild Steel (CRMS), or Cast Iron (CI).

Once the abreviation had been described, it could then be used througout the document without ambiguity.

Materiels such as Lead (PB) or Phosphor Bronze (PBn) which has differing grades, depending on the compositrion, are more difficult to differenciate and should be clearly identified.

[John Stevenson 1Participant @johnstevenson1]

You are missing the point, was the report right or wrong?

inquiring minds want to know……………………

 

John S.

[Diane CarneyModerator @dianecarney30678]

It’s as Steve Garnett said – if it’s me it’ll be right. I never write wrong things. Sometimes I do right wrongs though.

Diane

[blowlampParticipant @blowlamp]

Posted by John Stevenson on 31/07/2011 23:37:23:

You are missing the point, was the report right or wrong?

inquiring minds want to know……………………

 

John S.

 

 

I’ll need to conduct an enquirey and make a report, but bear in mind that many of the reports that I read are right in their intention, but wrong in their conclusion. This results in an investigation with regard to where things went wrong and – naturally enough – results in a report being produced.

 

So I’ll get back to you when I’m done.

 

 

Martin.

[Steve GarnettParticipant @stevegarnett62550]

Posted by blowlamp on 31/07/2011 23:29:28:

 

I would have been inclined to rearrange the wording to something like:

 

Diane Carne said “The report was wrong”.

 

Which should help to avoid confusion, but if you were to insist on the current layout, then maybe: et seq

 

Martin, the point wasn’t to display clear English, just to display how easy it is to confuse people – and in this case completely reverse the meaning of two otherwise identical sentences by inserting a couple of commas that a lot of people would give no heed to at all.

 

John, I expect that the report was wrong, and that Diane was quite correct in saying so. The reason for this is, of course, an interpretation of the SWMBO rules of engagement, I’m sure known to nearly all of us:

 

Rule 1. SWMBO is always right.

Rule 2. If SWMBO is wrong, rule 1 applies

 

 

Posted by Sid Herbage on 31/07/2011 22:57:24:

 

 

What then do we make of the tile “Model Engineers’ Workshop”? Is it a single workshop for multiple model engineers? (I presume it’s the magazine itself that is being described as the “workshop”).

 

The cop-out answer is that this is a throwback to the bad old days, of course. But any way you look at it, it’s plainly wrong. It would be rather more correct if you implied ‘the’ at the beginning, and called it ‘Model Engineer’s Workshop’. If it was about more than one workshop, then it should be ‘Model Engineers’ Workshops’. (plural engineers, plural workshops). What they’ve ended up with is a fudge that’s wrong for all cases. I think that the magazine is being described as about the (implied) workshop, incidentally, which is why I’d plump for moving the apostrophe to between the r and s, and we can just imagine ‘the’, or even ‘a’ if you like.

 

So what do you think the chances are of getting the biggest grammatical error – published every month on the front cover – corrected are?????? I’m not holding my breath!

 

Edited By Steve Garnett on 01/08/2011 00:11:57

[John Stevenson 1Participant @johnstevenson1]

 

Model Engineer’s Workshop.

I still think it’s a terrible description and must put many would be punters off. It implies that you/ they/ him / it / her [delete as required ] only makes models in their cave when in actual fact there are no models in the mag, it’s all about workshop tools and equipment.

 

Many of my one friends have workshops, none build models. their workshops are there to support another hobby.

 

Next time you go into W H Schmitt and co. Gmbh, take a look at some of the special interest magazines local to MEW, vintage cars, vintage and classic bikes, old tractors, Old Glory and a rake of preserved steam and this doesn’t cover any of the choo-choo boys mags.

 

All these people if they are active in their field [ sounds like an advert for Wurzel Gumidge ? ] need or can relate to a workshop and it’s equipment but models probably don’t rev then up.

 

The yanks [ hawk – spit – ding ] seem to have cornered the market with the title Home Shop Machinist . Perhaps when they default on their 14 trillion dollar debt next week Myhobbystore can buy the title up at 3 cents on the dollar ?

 

Other than that we are on V 179 at the moment, only 20 away from the magic 200 so would then be a good time to get this mag dragged kicking and screaming into the 20th century ?

 

Answers on a telegram please…………….

 

John S.

[Gone AwayParticipant @goneaway]

Posted by Steve Garnett on 01/08/2011 00:11:32:

Martin, the point wasn’t to display clear English, just to display how easy it is to confuse people – and in this case completely reverse the meaning of two otherwise identical sentences by inserting a couple of commas that a lot of people would give no heed to at all.

There’s always the old standby – the title of a book on grammar IIR (another TLA)

 

The Panda eats shoots and leaves.

 

The Panda eats, shoots and leaves.

[Steve GarnettParticipant @stevegarnett62550]

Posted by Sid Herbage on 01/08/2011 00:47:21:

There’s always the old standby – the title of a book on grammar IIR (another TLA)

 

The Panda eats shoots and leaves.

 

 

Well nearly… I had a good chin-wag years ago with Lynne Truss (L.T.), author of aforementioned book, and of course we agree about this entirely – but we would, wouldn’t we? Incidentally, it’s actually a book about punctuation, and she refers to it as the Zero Tolerance Guide.

 

The way she put the panda thing on the back cover of the book was as follows:-

 

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

 

“Why?” asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

 

“I’m a panda,” he says, at the door. “Look it up.”

 

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

 

“Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”

 

L.T. uses other examples of daft or ambiguous comma placement (or lack of it) in the book as well:

 

Leonora walked on her head, a little higher than usual.

The driver managed to escape from the vehicle before it sank and swam to the river bank.

 

 

Edited By Steve Garnett on 01/08/2011 01:20:47

[David Clark 13Participant @davidclark13]

Hi There

Just in case Diane, here are a few ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘. Add them in to MEW where required.

 

I did MEW basically on my own for almost 4 years.

I don’t think it was that bad on grammar.

It is very difficult to check your own editing.

 

I don’t know why the Model Engineers’ Workshop title is the way it is.

I think many model engineers must have their own Workshops.

 

We have a new title for Model Engineers’ Workshop in Canada and the States.

Still awaiting permission to use it.

It just needs a plate change on the cover during the print run.

regards David

[blowlampParticipant @blowlamp]

Steve.

Just to clarify my point.

I do find second line of your ‘report’ example confusing, not because it reverses the meaning of the previous similar line, which I don’t think it actually does, but because the punctuation as it stands just doesn’t make any sense to me without the quotation marks.

 

I believe Sid’s ‘Panda’ post (above), is a good example of where a well placed comma can help the author convey his message clearly and makes all the difference to the understanding of an article.

 

My reading of the title Model Engineers’ Workshop is that it refers to the community of Model Engineers in general, but each article is about a project within a particular Model Engineer’s Workshop, so I don’t see any real need to change anything on grounds of grammar.

 

If we are changing names, then how about Engineers Home Workshop, with or without apostrophy?

 

Martin.

[Diane CarneyModerator @dianecarney30678]

I read the title to mean as follows :-

‘The Workshop of Model Engineers’

or

‘This magazine is about what you can do in your Workshop if you are one of the thriving band of Model Engineers.’

 

[John Stevenson 1Participant @johnstevenson1]

I like Martins suggestion.

It takes away the model from the subject line. MHS has one title that I feel is correctly named in Model Engineer [ ME ] to do it correctly.

 

I fail to see in most of the articles where the emphasis is on model, in fact I have just looked at the index for #178 and nothing in there appertains to models, it’s all workshop related.

 

John S.

[David Clark 13Participant @davidclark13]

We can’t change it to something similar to the US magazines.

regards David

[michael howarth 1Participant @michaelhowarth1]

This thread was started off by someone who did not know what PB was. It has been quite interesting reading through the various explanations as to what might be the cause of this appalling ignorance. The education system, standards of written English, dumbing down etc. They may or may not have a part to play but surely it must be acknowledged that you cannot just “know” something unless you have either been taught it or have experienced it. So, a beginner in the hobby (?) of model engineering may come into it from a background of say, general engineering or he may have been say, a gardener or a bus driver. Would it not be somewhat predictable that the beginner from an engineering background would have a better general knowledge of the terms, materials and tooling than someone from a totally different line of work and interest.

 

How the beginner who is starting from scratch acquires the necessary knowledge that he will require could also be quite varied, some more effective than others. Maybe club membership, reading from books and magazines (back where we started), and the internet to name some obvious sources. What is definitely true is that we do not receive the necessary knowledge through divine inspiration……it has to be learnt, one way or the other. You are not born knowing what PB is.

 

An occasional visitor to my humble workshop is fascinated by the machine tools and what they can do, the hand tools and their applications and the variety of materials used. I remember recently demonstrating silver soldering to him because he had never seen or heard of it before. It would be quite easy, I suppose to put him in the dumbed- down, badly educated category (and I agree that they do exist in ever increasing numbers). Unfortunately, in this case my visitor is a retired gentleman of 65 years who is in no way uneducated or unintelligent and in fact holds a doctorate in mathematics….in which subject he has spent most of his life. Whilst he will quite happily talk to me about model engineering I would not dare to try and hold a conversation with him on advanced mathematics as I do not recognise the language he uses in his chosen field.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited By David Clark 1 on 01/08/2011 09:30:34

[Eric CoxParticipant @ericcox50497]

Catching up on the thread Steambuff writes (page 2) “I have seen “Steel” specified, a person with experience will know which to use … but the beginner would be totally lost … Stainless, Silver,Mild, (and then falls into the trap) BMS, etc

 

BMS = Bachelor of Marine Science

Edited By Eric Cox on 01/08/2011 09:43:33

Edited By Eric Cox on 01/08/2011 09:46:14

[NeillParticipant @neill]

I have to agree with Eric’s original post on this thread, there is a lot about model engineering that is daunting, especially for the beginner, and every effort should be made to clarify terminology rather than just assume knowledge.

 

For my sins, I have a piece of paper from one of our noble Engineering Institutions that says I’m allowed to call myself a “Chartered Mechanical Engineer”, but apart from doing metalwork at school (circa mid-seventies) and one term at Hackney Tech on machine tools in the late seventies I’ve no relevant practical experience other than that gleaned in my own workshop. I can witter on about enthalpy, entropy, partial vapour pressure, computational fluid dynamics etc, but when it comes to setting up a job in my lathe I’m left to using ingenuity and hopefully a good book or two.

 

When I write a report for work, I use language aimed at the interested layman and when I read something about about model engineering I would hope the author has worked on the same principle. Personally I think this is absolutely critical if we are to encourage younger members into the hobby, especially since the demise of adult education classes in college workshops.

[Geoff SheppardParticipant @geoffsheppard46476]

We debated the title of MEW many years ago. The magazine itself was thought to be ‘the workshop’ and it was for more than one model engineer (an ambiguous title in itself, but traditional), hence the position of the apostrophy.

 

Geoff

[Author]

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