'I make a living writing friendly and easily readable reports on complex subjects in clear English. If more engineers, economists, academics and bureaucrats did that, no one would need to hire me and I'd be on the dole queue!'
No Ministerial or Government jobs for you then unless you can write friendly and easily readable reports on complex subjects in SPIN?
From what I see of engineers, economists academics and bureaucrats (plus politicians) all you need to be careful of is running out of people who can actually understand [i]friendly and easily readable reports on complex subjects.
YM-Mundrabilla
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Well I try to write easily understood factual reports, usually with my analysis of the issue at the end. But it's hard not to be drawn into the bubbles of engineering, economics, law, finance, etc. that specialists live in. A few pages back in this thread, I explained the four main ways of sizing a ships tonnage in plain English. But people in that industry have no idea that 99% of the educated population don't understand the huge difference between things like displacement tonnage and gross tonnage, so what industry insiders say or write is confusing or misleading to people who live outside their bubble. But I still find myself getting drawn into specialist bubbles and my drafts often use jargon terms like "penstock" or "EBITDA", before I revise them and substitute a more easily understood term like "pressure pipeline" or "basic earnings".
. . --oo0oo-- . .
Actually, my observation of most politicians of centrist tendencies is that they go into parliament with ambitions of reducing spin and making the world friendlier and more easy to understand. By contrast, pollys of the far right and the far left tend to go into parliament with the intent to impose their will on an ignorant world.
But the differences don't last long because two things happen to both centrists and non centrist ideologues within their first term in parliament. First the party whips and spin doctors get to them and beat any spark of naive idealism or dogmatic ideology out of them, because (to the whips) it's all about winning more parliamentary seats and nothing else. Secondly, the bureaucrats get to the new MPs and destroy any desire they may have to make the world a more easily understood and happier place. The result is that by their second term, most politicians sound like bureaucrats, but only say what the party whips have authorised them to say.