atw: Re: Should we always give users what they ask for?

  • From: "Brian Clarke" <brianclarke01@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Mon, 9 Mar 2009 11:17:18 +1100

Hello Geoffrey,

This raises several really good discussion points.

Recently, I read the article by Tony Self, 'What if your readers can't read?' 
[I have corrected his heading into English from the original MS version of 
German] in Issue 16 of the Southern communicator. Tony seems to be advocating 
that we move en masse to sucking up to our children by providing online 
material in a form that bears a possibly faintly phonetic resemblance to some 
elements of English. And if we don't, he avers that we'll follow the dinosaur 
and the dodo. Tony can be very witty, and so it is possible his article was a 
bit tongue in cheek. His argument appears similar to one put forward by Pam 
Peters at a recent ASTC conference, where she seemed to be advocating that the 
spellings and meanings of words were whatever the mass of people said they 
were, no matter how that mass was defined or selected. When I accused Pam of 
being merely nosological, she countered very seriously that she was being 
phenomenological.

When I was a lecturer at one university in the UK, we were inundated by 
overseas fee-paying students for whom English was their 347th language - this 
was in the Reagan / Thatcher years of rampant economic rationality - and of 
course the time of being economical with the truth - another Thatcher 
government specialism. I was faced with the uncomfortable dilemma of giving 
these foreign students what they wanted - high marks [sometimes in exchange for 
accepting offers of untraceable gold to oil the process] - or grading the work 
based on the standards that had been established over the previous 20 or more 
years. What Australians need to realise is that a university in the UK cannot 
just choose what standards it wishes to push - there is an elaborate 
cross-university grading of student work before final marks are announced; this 
is quite different from Australia where any university can offer what ever it 
likes by way of standards, much like the American model. When I started to 
follow the cross-university standards path, I got hauled up before the beak and 
was told in no uncertain terms that I was killing the goose that laid the 
golden eggs. My response, from an engineering perspective, was that if we 
opened the window wider all manner of parasites [I used a shorter word] flew in 
- in engineering speak, if you increase the bandwidth, you get more noise.

So, on the one hand, I am aware of the marketing mantra - 'give the customers 
exactly what they seek'. But, as an engineer, I am aware that there are certain 
immutable basics that you ignore at your peril; eg, some of the laws of physics 
cannot be broken. So, do we take the immediacy of the statistical mean, or do 
we take the long term view of plus and minus three standard deviations, and the 
richness that is English?

Brian.

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