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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 like the idea. This could be enhanced with a thesaurus that would offer alternatives to difficult words. It could be a useful tool not only for writing clearer explanations, but also to compose easy readers for English learners.
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's also very possible to get the gist of a word, based on where it is placed and the words around it -- even if you don't know exactly what it means. (Obviously I'm not suggesting that for something like documentation writing -- but by the same token I would never think that limiting yourself to a 1,000 word dictionary for something as important as product docs would be beneficial in any way).
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.
Sure, but it's a fun writing exercise. If you write using a limited vocabulary and then fix the most convoluted paraphrases, you might end up in a better place than if you wrote it normally.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
First off, there are many dimensions to reading new languages. Nobody is saying "learn 1000 words of English and you're done for life". Rather, achieve fluency in a subset, then work on becoming more idiomatic. If you're lost somewhere and need help, nobody cares that you sound like a stupid child. (They probably won't notice, though. I've found through learning other languages that rare words are actually very rare and of extremely limited use. Obviously if someone uses it and you don't know it, you're stuck. But you can get by without it.)
US Space Team tells you what NASA does. NASA on its own tells you nothing about what they do, for all you know it could be the National Agricultural Sabotage Administration, and their goal is to blow up farms.
You have to separate language out into the multiple dimensions that it encompasses in order to understand certain aspects. It's clear to me that you use language as a social signalling method, "that person doesn't know what NASA is, hah, they're dumb and I won't associate with them as a result." That's fine, but there is another aspect: explaining ideas. And that can be done with less than the full set of all English words.