Author: Kirk

Randy Pausch: A Better Communicator

General

Carnegie Mellon University professor Randy Pausch died yesterday.

What is remarkable about this?

He was very public about his battle with cancer.

More important, he left a wonderful legacy, as my wife put it to me while I was writing this.

Pausch became well-known for the YouTube video titled “Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” — and what turned out to be his last lecture.

As I write this, YouTube shows that this video has been viewed 4,031,952 times.

Why? I believe that the reason is simple: Randy Pausch was a better communicator.

Watch the video; you will see what I mean.

For more inspiration, read his book The Last Lecture.

And, if you believe that you have time to neither watch the video nor read the book, then just remember this one quotation from Pausch: “We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.”

“advised of”

Common English Blunders, Prepositions, Verbs

I saw this combination this morning.

Problem:
The preposition “of” should not follow the verb “advised”.

Explanation:
When used as an intransitive verb, “advise” means to offer advice.

This morning I saw a sentence such as “He was advised of the situation.”

If we were to apply the definition of the intransitive verb “advise” to the sentence, we would get “He was offered advice of the situation.”

That would literally mean “He was offered the situation’s advice.”, but the situation itself has no advice.

Instead, the writer of the sentence was trying to say “He was told about the situation.”

This gives us the solution, which is that the intransitive verb “advised” should be followed by the preposition “about” instead of the preposition “of”.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following combinations (with the quotation marks) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “advised of” — 7,480,000 matches
  • “advised about” — 136,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors have used the incorrect vs. correct preposition by a ratio of 55-to-1, which is absolutely dreadful.

Solution:
“advised about”

“… it’s reliant upon System Ready-ness …”

Misspellings, Nouns

I saw this in a software test-plan document.

Problem:
“Ready-ness” — with the letter Y followed by a hyphen in the middle — is a misspelled noun.

Explanation:
As with many other words that end with the letter Y, the “y” in “ready” must be changed to “i” when the suffix N-E-S-S is appended to a word such as “ready”.

Furthermore, no hyphen should appear in the word “readiness”.

Beyond these two problems, there was no need to capitalize “System” and “Ready-ness”.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following words (with the quotation marks) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “readiness” — with the letter I in the middle — 17,700,000 matches
  • “ready-ness” — with the letter Y and a hyphen in the middle — 1,130 matches

This tells me that Web authors have written the word correctly vs. incorrectly by a ratio of 15,664-to-1, which is superb.

Solution:
“… it’s reliant upon system readiness …”