Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
I do find it a bit bizarre that the otherwise smart people that I work with, with English as their first language, will often resort to writing emails and documentation like a 14-year-old on AIM. I'm obviously much more forgiving of people that had to learn English as adults, but somewhat paradoxically I find that they typically write a lot more comprehensibly than most of the native-speaking engineers.<p>I'm hardly John Steinbeck or Mark Twain, but I've always felt that if I wanted to be treated like a grown-up, I should write like a grown-up, and as a result I have tried to write well. I try and be understanding of typos, because those are just honest mistakes, but when an adult sends an email to me saying something like "when r u going to do this?", I get a bit annoyed.