I’d always thought that people who worked with computers would have excellent communication skills. Computer programmers have to work with syntax, after all. And syntax is basically grammar for computer languages. As a matter of fact, syntax is much more unforgiving. Unlike humans, who can still get the gist of the phrase “Who did you met yesterday?”, computers require perfect syntax to be able to process your code. (Yes, they’re stupid that way.) Back during college, computer science majors could hold their own in writing contests. Also, teachers from the computer department had excellent speaking skills. It all made perfect sense to me.

Of course, at some point after leaving college I realized that computer skills and communication skills didn’t always go hand in hand. At least, not English skills anyway. (After all, just because you aren’t good at speaking or writing English, it didn’t mean you have bad communication skills — English probably just isn’t your first language.) I did notice, though, that most I.T. professionals were quite articulate. However, I did wonder: was it so important that they have good English skills too? Read more

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One day, I found myself at the car races. And like the geek that I was, I of course had a book on me. It was Lynne Truss’s fabulous book “Eats, Shoots & Leaves“, and one of my friends was intrigued with the title. “What’s it about?” she asked. “Punctuation,” I said. She made a face and said, “How boring that must be.”

So I hit her.

OK, I’m kidding. I didn’t really hit her. I just smiled understandingly and went back to my book. After all, if everybody were interested in every topic in existence, it would be a very homogenized and boring world we’d be living in.

While not everyone can relate to Truss’s passion for the semicolon, the Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing is a podcast for everyone. After all, good communication skills make us all better lawyers, programmers, architects and nurses. Read more

This year, on October 15, blogs all over the World Wide Web will be joining forces to help fight poverty by opening a discussion on poverty issues. It’s Blog Action Day, and it started last year where the topic was the environment.

Of course, it’s good to blog about the issues around the universal problem of poverty any day of the year, but when blogs are synchronized to do this on a particular day, the message will be much more powerful, and the message much stronger. Read more