[Rd] Phrase "package writer" in R-exts

[Ted Byers]

> From: r-devel-bounces at r-project.org [mailto:r-devel-bounces at r-
> project.org] On Behalf Of Davor Cubranic
> Sent: April-01-11 2:23 PM
>
> In a conversation with a programmer new to writing R packages, he
> mentioned that he was very confused by phrase "package writer" used in
> the document, and said that he "[was] literally imagining some sort of
> function that writes something related to packages".
> 
> I can see his point: not only is it confusing, but I think it's also bad
English (one
> wouldn't say "the novel's writer"). Can this be changed to "package
author"?
> 

No, it is not "bad English."   Neither would I regard it as being confusing.

To my eye, it is unambiguous.  

This reminds me of a conversation I had a few years ago with a well educated
individual who claimed that the sentence "He was hit by the ball" was
grammatically wrong, and that the correct way to express that idea was "The
ball hit him."  Needless to say, we ended up agreeing to disagree.  Of
course, obviously, BOTH are correct.  This individual had an earned Ph.D.
from a prominent north american university.  The English langage is
beautifully large and complex, having drawn both vocabulary and grammatical
structures from a wide variety of languages.  That makes it hard to learn to
use well, but it is arguably the most expressive language on the planet
(what oher language has a vocabulary as large as that in english or grammar
as flexible as is english).  I spent a little time working in India, and
found that ordinary working people, who happen to speak as many as 5 local
and regional languages in addition to english, and found that they use such
a different subset if standard english vocabulary from what the same sort of
people would normally use in Toronto (where I was born), that I had to
listen carefully in order to understand what they meant.  I even found
myself translating from standard english into standard english, for two
bright people with very different ethic backgrounds and who had learned
english after they turned 30.  The influences of their respective mother
tongues so distorted their use of english that they were mutually
incomprehensible even though it was obvious to me what each was saying.  One
sweet lady I met in Singapore (a waitress) told me she liked servicing me,
but didn't like serving the Australians next to me.  She said she found it
easy to understand me but she couldn't understand anything the Aussies at
the next table were saying.  I would never have noticed a significan
difference between how we spoke, but she had plenty of trouble trying to
figure out what they were saying.  One of my best friends spent 6 months of
his Ph.D. program just watching TV.  That was because even though his
grammar was perfect and his written english was beautiful, he had never hear
english spoken by a native english speaker.  Thus his diction was so
distorted by habits developed in speaking perfect Mandarin (his mother
tongue), that his spoken english was incomprehensible to everyone outside
China.

This is actually a major problem for any author that aspires to a global
market.  How do you write in such a way that you will be understood by
everyone in your target market?  I won't presume to offer writing advice to
the authors in question, in part because I don't know a good solution.

However, Davor, I notice you are at one of the finest universities in
Canada, so might I suggest you approach someone in the english department
there for insight into the evolution of english in the context of a
multicultural society,  and how that can help make our writing more readily
understood by a global  audience?  Note, while I see the author's
responsibility to write perfectly (or at least try), the reader also has a
responsibility to work at determining what the author meant by what he or
she wrote.

Cheers,

Ted