Videos of Bangalore Meetup at Proteans Software

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Minutes of the Bangalore Technical Writers Meetup for July '07

The Bangalore Technical Writers meet up-supported by STC India for this month was held at Proteans Software Solutions Pvt. Ltd, on Saturday 21st July 21, 2007. The topic for the discussion was “Theories of English Grammar for Technical Writers”. Anil Pinto, Lecturer in Communication and Media Theory, Christ College, Bangalore discussed with us on this topic.

Anyway, the name of the attendees' and their respective companies are listed below:

1. Anil Pinto – Christ College
2. K Sassendran- Proteans
3. Radhika Nair -Novell
4. Anindita Basu- Integra Micro Systems
5. Cresilla Lobo- Robert Bosch
6. Blessy Thomas- Citec
7. Vandana Rao- Alcatel-Lucent
8. Sinduja R- Honeywell
9. Manjunath- Truimph India
10.Saiprabha- SAP Labs
11.Nethravathi - C4C
12.Aaron R- Wipro
13.Binu PV-Lauteb Information
14.Jaimon Mathew- IGS
15.Sreejesh-EDS
16.Rajeeva B.C- NA
17.Sreejith G.S- Collabis India
18.Vinay Kumar- Consultant
19.Sunita S- Wipro
20.Chaitrao M- G4S Training Centre
21.Reena Lasrado- G4S Training Centre
22.Suchitra- Proteans
23.Rashmi Hebbur- Journalist
24.Banurekha Balaji- Honeywell
25.Jothi- NA
26.R.S.Raju- Adroit
27.Jayant Gandhi-
28.Rajdeep Gupta- Infosys

Highlights:

The meeting started at 11.15, by a quick round of informal introduction. The most interesting point about this session was that the attendees were from various working background that cut across different domains- from Film Making to Economics.

Rajdeep triggered the meeting by welcoming the attendees and the speaker Anil Pinto. Anil kicked of the interactive session by handing over the worksheet to the attendees. The participants were asked to fill in the quiz on “what is Grammar” and “What are the theories of grammar” followed by a discussion on the different answers that the participants came up with.

Anil could easily set off a great interest among the participants to listen to and actively debate on. He discussed the following Grammar theories: Traditional, Structural Transformational-generic.

Traditional theories can be tracked back to 18th century, wherein Orthography, Etymology, Syntax, Prosody, Composition, Spelling, Pronunciation, Sentence Analysis etc were the major focus of study. The Renaissance movement- a cultural rebirth from the 14th through the middle of the 17th centuries in Europe forced the English to think beyond Latin for the style and structure of their language.


The major issue with the Traditional theory was that no two languages have the same grammar. Every language has its own inherent difference. Wren & Martin’s Grammar is one of the best examples that follows traditional grammar theories that focused mainly on words, rather than sentence or language as a whole.

Wren & Martin’s grammar book follows Shakespeare style of English, which is not applicable in many domains such as Technical Writing (though this domain was not evolved in those days; Anil just gave an example).



In response to these issues, a Structuralist theory has been evolved. When Traditional theory concentrated on words, Structuralist theory mainly looked at language as a group of different sentences. People like Saussure researched on 'Signs'. He considered language as signs. Leonard Bloomfield’s language (1933) is a book that refers to structuralist theories. Structuralist theory attempted to understand the grammar of the sentence rather than
grammar of words and its alignment in the sentence.

Noam Chomsky is one of the apostles of the Transformational-generic theory which advocated the importance of language. Anil walked the attendees though the difference between the Surface structure and Deep structure of language, and he also gave a glimpse on present universal grammar.

After the presentation, it was the exercise session that triggered debate among the participant on subject-verb disagreement. The discussion took to different levels, where Anil and the participants discussed about the bridge between academia and the Industry. One of the attendees has the opinion that the industry really does not favour the intake of trainees due to the confidentiality of the project. Everybody agreed upon the need of a curriculum for Technical Writing. Again, Regularity, syllabus and dedicated faculty are the major roadblocks to the aforementioned.

Rajdeep sought feedback from the participants about the venue for conducting future meetups. He also encouraged the Participants to volunteer their time and efforts in sustaining the activities of this group by giving presentations or seminars. Rajdeep also briefed about the upcoming STC-India Career Day and Annual Conference.

You can download the presentation from the following URL : http://techwriter.meetup.com/2/files/

Also, view the meetup photos from the following URL:
http://techwriter.meetup.com/2/photos/?photoAlbumId=190364&photoId=1767636&op=defaultAlbum

The particpants felt that Anil has kindled enough interest in them to delve deeper into the subject. We look forward to another session from Anil where we can learn about how words relate to, and play with each other.