[charlessmall18]

I am an engineer by trade. As a youngster, I formed the habit of reading a book or two a week. Partway through my career, I got a job as a technical editor on a magazine for engineers. Cognitive psychologists have found the the high visual intelligence required for engineering often corellates strongly with mild-to-sever dyslexia. So engineers, in general, have a well-deserved reputation for being bad writers. At my magazine, they had a staff of young people with English (one has a PhD!), philosophy, journalism, and communications. Their job was to go over the copy of we engineers-turned-writers and "correct" our grammar and word usage. It was, in general, a sad experience. Consistantly, for example, they tried to "correct" my grammar when I used the subjunctive mood. One day I used the word "welter" in a headline and they all angrily ganged up on me, accusing me of using an obscure word that readers would not understand. Further, I noticed that the adverd, as a part of speech, had disappeared from their grammar. Technical copy often has a log-jam of nouns masquerading as adjectives piled up in front of the subject of a sentence. If I tried to use and adverb to modify an adjective or a past participle, they would always substitute the past participle. For example, "Freshly baked bread." always got changed to "Fresh baked bread." I am not quibbling about schoolmarmish nicities; their ability to cast sentences with precision simipy did not compare with that of us older engineers. And these young people were the ones who supposedly read!