Why language is important

At a previous position, I was in a constant fight for Marketing taking the time and having the appropriate employees so that the language on the web site was correct.

To be frank; I was embarrassed by the many grammatical errors and the lousy language. I know the language on this blog is far from perfect, but this is a private web site.

But my boss didn't agree. He thought it didn't matter. And to some, like my boss and the people at marketing at that company, it isn't important. But I would never buy something from a company who couldn't even spell the product names correctly. And I know others who feel the same. Companies not caring about language are not serious about their business.

But often enough, a poor language can lead to misunderstanding in ways you could not imagine. Look at the waste basket on the picture. What does it say; should I waste more or should I put the waste in the bin? I hope most people understand what they are supposed to do, but could you blame someone for reading is as they should create more waste?

The new open Microsoft?

What's the buzz about? That big corporate news, well, the Swedish press release they stated it was NOT about Yahoo. In reality, it is about openness. My god, New Microsoft Interoperability Principles Ensure Open Connections and Promote Data Portability, these are so many weird words at once that I almost fell asleep when I read it. But when I read it one word at the time I could almost make some sense into the sentence.

Is this the new, open Microsoft. A lot of text. A lot of promises. I hope, a lot of good news, which will come true. But I hope the openness also will affect the headline language of their press releases.

a new language

I just read a message to my boss and two colleagues. Even if it contains no code or domain specific word I guess my mom could understand about a third of the words. I use words like scrum, scrum master, product owner, product owner proxy, backlog, product backlog, sprint objectives, increment, storyboard, use case. Well, this gets me thinking. My mom could be a user, or a customer. What if I went out to her place of work using these words while talking to her:

- Well, this use story is not in any storyboard I've seen on the sprint backlog for this sprint. I don't think I've even seen it on the product backlog. I can ask the product owner or the scrum master what the status is.

These words separate the ones inside the agile scrum sphere from all the others. You actually have to read quite a bit of literature before you can understand the difference between all these terms. So, using these terms should be banned outside the scrum sphere. If the customer and user had not been included in some kind of scrum education or workshop, they cannot be expected to know what they mean and using the terms is therefore in basic insulting. So, next time bite your tongue and simply say:

- Haven't thought about that. Haven't seen that on any lists so it's probably not planned. I can ask someone who should know.

Andy Hunt on how hard it is

Andy Hunt gave, not all unexpectedly, a very interesting and thoughtful presentation. One of the most interesting issues are of course complexity. How hard is it? Well, one thing might not be hard, but many things are. And complexity build exponentially. And therefore it's important to know when to add complexity, or features, or documentation. Or what ever you want to call it.

Is it difficult to write English? Well, I can use a dictionary and translate word after word and each and every word is correctly translated. But the sentence will not be correct. It is often like that with features: it is easy to translate them into code, but when we add more than one feature, they have to work together. So, what do you do when you learn a new language? well, you probably don't start with the most complex sentences, you start small. You start simple. Try it and see if it works.

I can't help thinking about Robert, in the Swedish classic the Emigrants. He wanted to learn English and got a book. He saw the spelling and the phonetics. Guessed which he would use when talking and guessed wrongly. He spent all that time learning all that. For nothing.

Thanks, Valtech, and thanks Mr Hunt, for a wonderful evening and many thoughts to bring home to the guys.

More than words...

The other day we were discussing words at work. Being a business analyst I have a problem that words mean different things in different lines of business. Like Object, what is that? It's not as easy as referring to a word list because some words have a special meaning for a small group that is not perhaps aware of their special usage of a word.

In other cases the meaning can also lie in the mental image you project when you hear a word. Take martyr as an example. When you hear that word you can, perhaps unaware of the fact, think [be] a martyr or [act as] a martyr. And that first mental image says a lot about you and how you will interpret the rest of the conversation.

Me, being a sarcastic non romantic, visualize the "oh, feel sorry for me for I'm the martyr" characters who spend to much time convincing themselves and others that they are unselfish that they spend all their time thinking about themselves. Unselfish, naaa.

Someone else thinks about the stoic hero who throws himself in front of a mortal danger to save others.

These common words are the most dangerous during modeling and discussions on software development since you take the word and it's mental image for granted. Myself, I'm just happy that I don't have to build in some martyr functionality in our product.

The buzz of buzz words

Does buzz words work during the sales process? If I say that our solution implements SOA, does that make someone buy the stuff? Well, first, I believe that all buzz words that become common in a field, like SOA, becomes so widely used that it finally doesn´t mean anything or that it mean everything. Also, it treat the person not into buzz words feel like an idiot, not knowing the word.
In the other case, the buzz word is not common and then it really doesn't mean anything to the buyer. And again, he's made to look like a fool. People doesn't like feeling like fools. Treat customers with respect, avoid buzz words. And explain instead how the system/solution would work with their processes. And if they are into buzz words, they might connect the dots and think, hey, that's SOA. But then it's their choice.

More than words

I thought she was a pain in the ass. The marketing woman of my past. When I presented her with texts, she always badgered me about spelling, just using Swedish in Swedish texts. Avoiding buzz words. And using the same rules for large and small letters in product- and company names. Avoiding different form in texts. When having lists keeping the same form in the whole list.
I thought she was a pain in the ass. But now I'm the pain in the ass. It slowly developed. The love of the language. And a criticism against and user unfriendly web sites and texts. Because there are user unfriendly texts.
When I visit a web site where you immediately can see that the responsible does not have a feeling for language, I get suspicious. I sometimes don´t buy a product if the web site or the brochure is filled with examples of bad language. And with bad language I don't mean swearing. I mean not paying attention to detail. I mean when you can tell that the writer hasn't read the text aloud (in their head or actually aloud) and removed all those errors you find in that process. It's about those people who don't let someone else spell check their work.
Paying attention to language is paying attention to quality.
How could I possibly trust a company selling a high tech product if they can't even produce readable text? And it's all about realizing that it's not about using the spelling features of the text editor of choice.