
Ask HN: Rhetoric course to learn to report Grenfell/MCAS/O-ring risk? - afarrell
Suppose you are an engineer who has identified what you reasonably believe to be a serious and safety-critical problem in what you are building. You have an ethical obligation to society to report that so it does not harm or kill members of the public. However, this can be a challenge:<p>- You don’t know how to frame the problem in a way that business owners will grasp the significance of.<p>- There is a highly-visible cost to fixing the problem, but the costs&#x2F;risks of problem are not visible.<p>- People sometimes interpret technically-rigorous speech as pedantry<p>- Those whose lives are threatened are not key stakeholders.<p>And more. This set of problems is deep enough that I expect it not to be answered in a thread, though discussion is good.<p>What is a good regularly-running course of the art of pursuasion for engineers?
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afarrell
One base skill for effective persuasion is the ability to structure paragraphs
which convey complex concepts with high clarity and clear emphasis on the
important.

A good book on this topic is:

Style: Toward Clarity and Grace (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing and
Publishing)
[https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0226899152/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0226899152/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_M5wVDbTGHY564)

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afarrell
Patrick McKenzie has written a good blog post within this topic about the
value of branding for the Heartbleed bug:
[https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/09/what-heartbleed-can-
tea...](https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/09/what-heartbleed-can-teach-the-
oss-community-about-marketing/)

