Information Technology Reference
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to flexibility, all in the context of the individual user. From the first tenta-
tive familiarization steps, the consultation process has been used to refine
the requirements by continued scrutiny and rigorous analysis until, by some
alchemical process, those needs have been transmuted into specifications.
These specifications distill the quintessence of the existing system.
The above extract has the excuse that it forms part of a sales pitch, but the following
is from a scientific paper on concurrent database systems.
We have already seen, in our consideration of
what is
, that the usual sim-
plified assumptions lead inexorably to a representation that is desirable,
because a solution is always desirable; but repugnant, because it is false.
And we have presented
what should be
, assumptions whose nature is not
susceptible to easy analysis but are the only tenable alternative to ignorance
(absence of solution) or a false model (an incorrect solution). Our choice
is then Hobson's choice, to make do with what material we have—viable
assumptions—and to discover whether the intractable can be teased into a
useful form.
Deciphering this paper was not easy. The following is a rough translation, with no
guarantee that the intended meaning is preserved.
We have seen that the usual assumptions lead to a tractable model, but this
model is only a poor representation of real behaviour. We therefore proposed
richer assumptions, which are however difficult to analyze. Now we con-
sider whether there is any way in which our assumptions can be usefully
applied.
Novice writers can be tempted to imitate the style of, not science writing, but popular
science writing.
As each value is passed to the server, the “heart” of the system, it is checked
to see whether it is in the appropriate range.
Each value passed to the central server is checked to see whether it is in the
appropriate range.
Don't dress up your ideas as if they were on sale. In the following I have changed
the author's name to “Grimwade”.
Sometimes the local network stalls completely for a few seconds. This is
what we call the “Grimwade effect”, discovered serendipitously during an
experiment to measure the impact of server configuration on network traffic.
Sometimes the local network stalls for a few seconds. We first noticed this
effect during an experimental measurement of the impact of server configu-
ration on network traffic.
But consider the following extract from a paper on some pragmatics for indexing,
which illustrates that it is not necessary to write in a literary or pedantic style. It is
