Preaching to the choir

I spent most of yesterday morning in a plain language writing workshop, along with a couple dozen tech writers, lawyers, economists and other people. It was mostly a lecture and some focused exercises on improving prose qua prose, such as by avoiding pretentious Latin and using clearer wording. I also appreciated learning that I could use certain organizational techniques I hadn't thought of before in rulemaking documents. It was an example of a good speech, too: genuinely humerous anecdotes rather than forced jokes, PowerPoint used well, a little audience participation to keep people on their toes. It wasn't perfect - some verbal chaff, some mechanical glitches with videos - but much better than usual around here. So, good stuff overall.

I'm annoyed, though, that certain people weren't there. The unhelpful guy wasn't. Nor was the engineer who wouldn't let me simplify a requirement recently, saying that it would be fine as is because if I could understand it then anyone could. Nor were any SMEs, as far as I could tell.

That's misguided, because they need the help more than I do. Sure, I just got dinged for my writing recently, but I still manage to be up to professional caliber when I'm thinking about it. Some people here write badly enough that they'd probably get failing grades in college classes on the subjects they're experts in. It's a shame that their bosses didn't expect them to come to this the way mine did.

I'm not bringing this up just as a "writing well is really, really important, mmmkay?" PSA, not just because I parochially believe in the importance of my personal field, not just to regurgitate reassurances I heard for 10 years about how writing is actually a valuable skill even though the Computer Science majors and MBAs are the ones who made big bucks right out of college. The reason I wish SMEs had been at the meeting is because they do more of the writing than me, so it would save time in the long run if they did it better. This is inefficient. This is government waste.

As I've said, both on version control and way back in my second post here, a lot of the work I do could be done better or made unnecessary to start with by other people. The more time SMEs would spend thinking about putting things into their logical order and avoiding jargon, the fewer questions I'd have to ask them and meetings we'd have to have and rounds of review documents would have to go through. I know I can't complain too much about inefficiencies that keep me employed in a relatively easy job, but it's still annoying.