In Praise of Professional Precision

I n a letter published in Computer's December 2005 issue, Michael Hobbs took me to task for seeming " to prefer structure and organized taxonomies " (Letters, p. 5). He noted that I advocate " that we need more precise, prescriptive definitions for our technical terms. " By contrast, Hobbs described himself as " more of a laissez–faire kind of guy— let a thousand flowers bloom, and so forth. " Actually, he didn't take me to task for pedantry but for the inconsistency he saw in an earlier essay, an inconsistency that my published response addressed. Nonetheless, Hobbs touched on a particularly pertinent point, one I feel must be strongly pressed, as this column's regular readers will have realized. Letting a thousand flowers bloom is just fine for a florist, but a botanist, as a member of the professional arm of floristry, must be precise about just what plants those flowers are blooming on. In the same way, we have a duty as computing professionals to be precise in our technical writings and discussions. Precision in language has many aspects. To be precise means, according to The Oxford English Dictionary, to be " Strict in the observance of rules, form, or usage; formal, correct; punctilious , scrupulous, particular. " These definitions overlap somewhat, so we will here distinguish between prescrip-tivity, observance of formal rules; par-ticularity, attention to details of correct form; perspicuity, punctilio as to clarity and lucidity; and profundity, scrupu-lousness in making fine distinctions. Precision in professional language has two purposes: to make communication with fellow professionals specific and unambiguous, and to inform people outside the profession meaningfully and clearly. Of course, all serious communication should be meaningful and clear, but with fellow professionals it's also necessary to use a modicum of jargon and initialisms that will be neither meaningful nor clear to others. PRESCRIPTIVITY Rules are the basis for conformity, which is the precept for preventing confusion and disagreement. Computing professionals are quite comfortable with observing formal rules when coding programs for compilers, but observe formal rules rather passively when putting other text together. There are two kinds of formal rules to be considered here. The first is professional , the second pervasive. Professional formality is embodied in formal standards, such as the IFIP–ICC Vocabulary of Information Processing (www.iso.ch/ en/CatalogueDetailPage. CatalogueDetail?CSNUMBER=7229), a vocabulary that supposedly has some legal status. This vocabulary of basic terms is all but unknown …