bloggo ergo sum

Notice how the title of this post is properly capitalized: All the Meaningful Words of a Title are Supposed to be Capitalized.

I am in the middle of reading a technical document at work. It’s the latest of several documents I’ve read at work that are badly written. One of the most annoying things I’ve found that people do here is capitalize words that shouldn’t be capitalized; like all nouns, for example. A sample:

Each Service publishes a Contract with …

and

Since the Kernel acts solely as a runtime environment for Services…

The document is littered with sentences like the above. It’s highly distracting. The word “Service” should not be capitalized. Neither should the words “Contract” or “Kernel”. They aren’t proper names nor do the refer to some individual object or idea.

The writing is too familiar (too many instances of phrases like “we did this…” or “You will find it easier to…”). It’s also very preachy; the document in question is supposed to be an overview of a particular application and the associated frameworks and libraries. Instead, it’s a rambling description of portions of the subject with whole paragraphs devoted to telling me why they think .NET is peachy-keeno and how they don’t use WSDL but have special interfaces for what they define as a service. Not only does the author seem to reveal a misunderstanding of services and what WSDL actually is, he couches it in a way that makes him seem willfully ignorant.

Anyway, I could go on and on about the poor quality of writing that I see on a daily basis. That’s actually one of the reasons I maintain this blog; it’s a way for me to regularly exercise my writing skills – with complete, properly capitalized sentences and other elements like good grammar and oft-unused vocabulary.