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anybody want aquarium tickets?
May. 14th, 2013 03:29 pmI've got a pair of free tickets to the National Aquarium in Baltimore that expire on June 2-- does anyone want them?
May. 14th, 2013
anybody want aquarium tickets?
May. 14th, 2013 03:29 pmI've got a pair of free tickets to the National Aquarium in Baltimore that expire on June 2-- does anyone want them?
Xposty from dreamwidth.
Xposty from dreamwidth.
academic writing and defense writing
May. 14th, 2013 04:10 pmI read this article the other day-- talking about the problem of academic writing by people who have no idea how to write. (And, tangentially to where I'm about to go with this, it occurs to me to be interested in the intersection of this and some of the populist nonfiction I've been reading lately, which is readable in the sense the article talks about and full of gimmicky techniques that I think of as bad writing. Present tense narration. Metaphor soup. Ugh.)
My father's dream job, which he was fortunate enough to get two rounds of, once in the mid-80s and then again for a six year block ending in 2011, was to be a program manager at DARPA. That's the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, for the unfamiliar, and its purpose is to research things that *might* be brilliant innovations but haven't been sufficiently proven to get sponsored by the appropriate armed forces branch. They're responsible for the advent of things like GPS (and hence cell phones) and the internet (via the ARPAnet.) A lot of what a DARPA program manager does is fund and work with brilliant young start-ups to do neat things, but to find the projects to fund in the first place, one spends a great deal of time reading proposals, many of which appear to be written by the same kind of non-writers as were responsible for the previously mentioned textbooks. The story goes that there was one particular person whose prose was so bad that it became more comprehensible if you only read every other word, and it didn't matter which one you started with.
This was a particular trial to my father, who actually *could* write well (if longwindedly); his advice to anyone who might be thinking of submitting a project proposal is to imagine that the person reading it has got a stack of sixty of these things which they've left most of to the last minute (because dealing with the projects you've already got going is usually far more interesting...) and so it's a sleepy Sunday afternoon and the last three proposals have been so ghastly that even a conscientious reader couldn't quite make it all the way to the end, and all the reader really wants to do is go watch the ball game, but there are ten more in the stack that have to be read by Monday... and if your proposal isn't clearly worded and easy to read, it isn't going to matter how brilliant your ideas are.
A few years before I was born, my father had the submarine officer's required interview with Admiral Rickover (this was apparently kind of the equivalent of hazing for nukes; my father would have preferred to go back to diesel boats, which he did before going off to grad school, and after his fifteen minutes of trauma he was pretty sure he was going to) and I believe it was as part of his de-stressing from that that he wrote an essay for the Naval Institute Vincent Astor Memorial Leadership Essay Contest about just what was wrong with the way the nuclear submarine program was being run. As the only well-written submission they got for the entire contest, it won, and they had to print it in the Naval Institute Proceedings. (He also got a nice chunk of prize money with which he bought a radial arm saw: the first large tool purchase in forty years of collecting a basement wood shop.) And then he ended up getting assigned to a nuke after all. Fortunately his new CO's wife read the essay first, and was the one to hand it to her husband with glowing praise saying, "now I understand what you've been complaining about!"
My father's dream job, which he was fortunate enough to get two rounds of, once in the mid-80s and then again for a six year block ending in 2011, was to be a program manager at DARPA. That's the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, for the unfamiliar, and its purpose is to research things that *might* be brilliant innovations but haven't been sufficiently proven to get sponsored by the appropriate armed forces branch. They're responsible for the advent of things like GPS (and hence cell phones) and the internet (via the ARPAnet.) A lot of what a DARPA program manager does is fund and work with brilliant young start-ups to do neat things, but to find the projects to fund in the first place, one spends a great deal of time reading proposals, many of which appear to be written by the same kind of non-writers as were responsible for the previously mentioned textbooks. The story goes that there was one particular person whose prose was so bad that it became more comprehensible if you only read every other word, and it didn't matter which one you started with.
This was a particular trial to my father, who actually *could* write well (if longwindedly); his advice to anyone who might be thinking of submitting a project proposal is to imagine that the person reading it has got a stack of sixty of these things which they've left most of to the last minute (because dealing with the projects you've already got going is usually far more interesting...) and so it's a sleepy Sunday afternoon and the last three proposals have been so ghastly that even a conscientious reader couldn't quite make it all the way to the end, and all the reader really wants to do is go watch the ball game, but there are ten more in the stack that have to be read by Monday... and if your proposal isn't clearly worded and easy to read, it isn't going to matter how brilliant your ideas are.
A few years before I was born, my father had the submarine officer's required interview with Admiral Rickover (this was apparently kind of the equivalent of hazing for nukes; my father would have preferred to go back to diesel boats, which he did before going off to grad school, and after his fifteen minutes of trauma he was pretty sure he was going to) and I believe it was as part of his de-stressing from that that he wrote an essay for the Naval Institute Vincent Astor Memorial Leadership Essay Contest about just what was wrong with the way the nuclear submarine program was being run. As the only well-written submission they got for the entire contest, it won, and they had to print it in the Naval Institute Proceedings. (He also got a nice chunk of prize money with which he bought a radial arm saw: the first large tool purchase in forty years of collecting a basement wood shop.) And then he ended up getting assigned to a nuke after all. Fortunately his new CO's wife read the essay first, and was the one to hand it to her husband with glowing praise saying, "now I understand what you've been complaining about!"