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Cleartext: A text editor that only allows the 1,000 most common words in English

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Re: Cleartext: A text editor that only allows the 1,000 most common words in English

#41

Post by yuncun »

SwellJoe wrote: post #27
brianstorms wrote: post #10

Unclear on why this is a good thing. Dumbing down language helps whom, exactly? I guess if you want to hasten the Idiocracy this is your app.

Writing so that children, people for whom English is a second language, and people otherwise unable to comprehend advanced writing, can understand you is not a bad thing. I'm considering applying this to my product documentation, even though our users are generally well-educated...we can't afford to have docs translated into a dozen languages, but simple English may be readable by enough foreign language speakers to…

Agreed. Some people think that big words are good. Me, I think good writing should be like good code; short and easy to understand.

Re: Cleartext: A text editor that only allows the 1,000 most common words in English

#42

Post by AndrewUnmuted »

gregschlom wrote: post #24

Am I the only one to find that using only the 1,000 most common words actually makes thing harder to understand? The writer ends up having to use convoluted paraphrases to refer to things where a precise, well defined and well understood word exists but it's not part of the top 1,000.

The technique is working quite well for Donald Trump: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/09/15/ho...

> Some of his answers last only a few seconds, some are slightly longer, but almost all consist of simple sentences, grammatically and conceptually, and most of them withhold their most important word or phrase until the very end. Trump’s sentences end with a pop, and he seems to know instinctively where to put the emphasis in each one.

Re: Cleartext: A text editor that only allows the 1,000 most common words in English

#43

Post by hackbinary »

gregschlom wrote: post #24

Am I the only one to find that using only the 1,000 most common words actually makes thing harder to understand? The writer ends up having to use convoluted paraphrases to refer to things where a precise, well defined and well understood word exists but it's not part of the top 1,000.

Maybe the author is just out by an order of magnitude? Maybe it should be 10,000 words?

Re: Cleartext: A text editor that only allows the 1,000 most common words in English

#44

Post by kazinator »

gregschlom wrote: post #24

Am I the only one to find that using only the 1,000 most common words actually makes thing harder to understand? The writer ends up having to use convoluted paraphrases to refer to things where a precise, well defined and well understood word exists but it's not part of the top 1,000.

With just the words "zero" and "one" strung together in some combination, we can describe a JPEG image, which can be a picture of anything. (For instance, a black and white scan of the word "deoxyribonucleic" in a Times Roman font).

Re: Cleartext: A text editor that only allows the 1,000 most common words in English

#45

Post by consum3dbyfire »

AndrewUnmuted wrote: post #42
gregschlom wrote: post #24

Am I the only one to find that using only the 1,000 most common words actually makes thing harder to understand? The writer ends up having to use convoluted paraphrases to refer to things where a precise, well defined and well understood word exists but it's not part of the top 1,000.

The technique is working quite well for Donald Trump: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/09/15/ho... > Some of his answers last only a few seconds, some are slightly longer, but almost all consist of simple sentences, grammatically and conceptually, and most of them withhold their most important word or phrase until the very end. Trump’s sentences end with a pop, and he seems to know instinctively wh…

Looks like the creator picked up on that, as well:

https://medium.com/@mortenjust/i-doomed-mankind-with-a-free-...

Re: Cleartext: A text editor that only allows the 1,000 most common words in English

#47

Post by jonathankoren »

tim333 wrote: post #31
gregschlom wrote: post #24

Am I the only one to find that using only the 1,000 most common words actually makes thing harder to understand? The writer ends up having to use convoluted paraphrases to refer to things where a precise, well defined and well understood word exists but it's not part of the top 1,000.

Could be handy for non native English speakers though - less to learn.

I seriously doubt it, who wants to sound like a very stupid child?

This is more of an XKCD fan boy project. So let's look at a famous XKCD comic using this, "US Space Team's Up Goer Five". "US Space Team" barely makes sense, does more to obscure than illuminate, and "Up Goer Five" makes no sense at all.

Re: Cleartext: A text editor that only allows the 1,000 most common words in English

#48

Post by bovermyer »

gregschlom wrote: post #24

Am I the only one to find that using only the 1,000 most common words actually makes thing harder to understand? The writer ends up having to use convoluted paraphrases to refer to things where a precise, well defined and well understood word exists but it's not part of the top 1,000.

Directly relevant: Toki Pona, a language with 123 (ish) words. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/toki-p...

Re: Cleartext: A text editor that only allows the 1,000 most common words in English

#50

Post by skystrife »

kazinator wrote: post #28

It should support a few template sentences which define a word, which is then allowed to occur in the remainder of the text. More useful than a document which uses only 1000 common words is a document which uses only 1000 words, plus words which it clearly defines. I feel as if I could write almost anything if I have that, and it will be self-contained and accessible to anyone with the thousand word vocabulary, plus…

This idea reminds me of an amazing talk by Guy Steele: https://youtu.be/_ahvzDzKdB0

He starts the talk by assuming monosyllabic words as his primitives and builds up the words he needs to use to give the talk by providing definitions for them first.

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