Raise the Hammer

Everybody cut Kathleen some slack, I see so much of this stuff in my professional life its no better or worse than what professional urban planners, engineers, designers and architects have to pump out day after day. We all have our various strengths and weaknesses. Most of those professional reports put out by cities and professional consultancies are worked on and massaged by whole groups of people, 4 or more people sometimes, just doing the editing before it goes out to the public. Not a single and most likely, overworked student. If anything, the only thing I would really be even remotely critical about is that very little of this report is new information. However, since it was written in the form of a synopsis anyway, I really can't be too critical when she did exactly what she set out to do, in a very short amount of space I might add.

I once had to do a report to a conference whose main theme was the state of transportation planning in the urban and suburban operating environment of North America. My "book" as it was called, was about the conversion of Ottawa's BRT system to LRT operating technology. It was 65 pages long, with nearly 30 pages of appendices, definitions, references and citing of points. I considered this level of citing to be utterly ridiculous but it had to be done that way. I was told that, the report was going out to a varied group of professional people who may or may not be familiar at all with the subject matter. When the conference was over I was told how impressed everybody was with the final product but why did I have to put so much, "needless referencing and definitions crap at the end!" That was coming from professionals! Kathleen is an engineering student and I have personally seen a lot worse being pumped out by so called professional engineers.