How to Write in Plain English • Hacker News Board

Re: How to Write in Plain English

#51

Post by nicbou » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 9:45 AM UTC

omnicognate wrote: post #46

nicbou wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't make your readers hold parts of the sentence in their head. Reorder or split sentences until it can be avoided. In other words, use a really small buffer. "You must fill form 331 unless you are over 60 years old, in which case you must fill form 445." "You must fill form 331. If you are over 60 years old, you must fill 445 instead." "If you are over 60 years old, you must fill form 445. Otherwise, you must fill…

Overflowing that buffer really does feel like a stack overflow, too. Your whole mental state just suddenly disappears in a puff of smoke. This resplendent sentence in the Vulkan spec did it to me the other day: The layout of subresources of images on other logical devices that are bound to VkDeviceMemory objects associated with the same underlying memory resources as external memory objects on the lost device becomes…

This is how I felt while reading philosophy essays. I'm not even sure half of those are even saying anything.

Re: How to Write in Plain English

#52

Post by dragonwriter » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 9:50 AM UTC

> * A list that is a continuous sentence with several listed points picked out at the beginning, middle or end.

> * A list of separate points with an introductory statement (like this list).

> In the list above, each point is a complete sentence

Er, no, each of those is a (quite long, given the target sentence size the piece argues for) freestanding noun phrase, not a complete sentence.

Re: How to Write in Plain English

#53

Post by vidarh » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 9:51 AM UTC

nicbou wrote: post #51

omnicognate wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overflowing that buffer really does feel like a stack overflow, too. Your whole mental state just suddenly disappears in a puff of smoke. This resplendent sentence in the Vulkan spec did it to me the other day: The layout of subresources of images on other logical devices that are bound to VkDeviceMemory objects associated with the same underlying memory resources as external memory objects on the lost device becomes…

This is how I felt while reading philosophy essays. I'm not even sure half of those are even saying anything.

A lot of philosophy essays are written as part of the writer being in the process of trying to figure things out for themselves, without quite having gotten there yet.

Re: How to Write in Plain English

#54

Post by fooblat » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 10:00 AM UTC

This is especially important when working at an international company with many non-native English speakers.

One of the software engineers (an English major) I worked with at a previous gig could not get his head around the idea of writing in plan English.

He would write English at such an elaborate level that when he announced his resignation to the company via email, most people did not understand from that email that he was resigning!

Re: How to Write in Plain English

#55

Post by laputan_machine » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 10:01 AM UTC

ralphstodomingo wrote: post #39

I'm curious. Is there a specific reason why the trend for our use of the English language went towards this direction, when in the past, a lot of the historical material I read seemed intentionally verbose? Sure, it's all for ensuring we are understood better among ourselves, but I wonder if writing this way makes us cognitively simpler.

If the aim is to get a point across, why use complicated words and sentences, when simple ones might be better understood?

If an idea can be expressed in the same way with "Plain English", how would this make people 'congnitively simpler'?

Re: How to Write in Plain English

#56

Post by DrBazza » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 10:01 AM UTC

English vs. business English.

Pre-boarding is just boarding. Pre-booking is just booking.

Pre-prefixing everything. Sigh.

"Please revert" - you mean 'reply', not 'return to a former state'.

"Ping me" - ugh.

And my favourite.... "Learnings" - you mean lessons. "What drivings have you been on?" ... "What journeys have you been on?"

Re: How to Write in Plain English

#57

Post by bloak » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 10:05 AM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #44

nicbou wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't make your readers hold parts of the sentence in their head. Reorder or split sentences until it can be avoided. In other words, use a really small buffer. "You must fill form 331 unless you are over 60 years old, in which case you must fill form 445." "You must fill form 331. If you are over 60 years old, you must fill 445 instead." "If you are over 60 years old, you must fill form 445. Otherwise, you must fill…

Your last one requires keeping the first clause of the first sentence in your head; just because you've split sentences doesn't mean you've avoided that, because “otherwise” imports the conditional in the previous sentence by reference and then inverts it. To actually avoid requiring the reader to keep sentence parts in their head, use if-then or do-if constructs, but not if-then-else constructs. “Complete form 445 i…

That's a bad example of how to express age limits. If I've just had my 60th birthday, or perhaps today is my birthday, which applies, or do I have to fill in both forms?

Also, is it my age at the time I sign the form, or my age at the time the form is received, that matters? Arguably that's a problem with the rule itself rather than how it's expressed. It's better if you can write something like: "If you were born before 6 April 1960 ... otherwise ...". Note that "after 6 Apr 1960" is arguably more ambiguous than "before 6 Apr 1960" because there's a slight risk that someone could interpret "6 Apr 1960" as meaning 1960-04-06 00:00:00.

This problem is vaguely related to the insurance policy renewals that leave a one-minute gap between the old policy and the new policy, and even more vaguely related to the ambiguity of "midnight on the next day".

Re: How to Write in Plain English

#58

Post by gherkinnn » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 10:07 AM UTC

wazoox wrote: post #29

dreen wrote: post #14

Heres a great list from GOV.UK of the kind of words to avoid when using Plain English: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/style-guide/a-to-z-of-gov-uk-sty...

Beautiful. The worst is that many of these ugly words come en masse to the lips of marketing droids speaking in other languages. They can't help but pepper their stupid speeches with bad English. God how I hate that.

How else would you describe seven red lines?

Re: How to Write in Plain English

#59

Post by dijit » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 10:09 AM UTC

DrBazza wrote: post #56

English vs. business English. Pre-boarding is just boarding. Pre-booking is just booking. Pre-prefixing everything. Sigh. "Please revert" - you mean 'reply', not 'return to a former state'. "Ping me" - ugh. And my favourite.... "Learnings" - you mean lessons. "What drivings have you been on?" ... "What journeys have you been on?"

“Ping me” really threw me for a loop the first time I heard a non-tech say it in an obvious non-tech way.

It literally has no other meaning outside of the ICMP echo utility; and the onomatopoeia of hitting glass.

How did it enter the Business world?

Re: How to Write in Plain English

#60

Post by Mediterraneo10 » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 10:12 AM UTC

frabert wrote: post #47

ralphstodomingo wrote: post #39

I'm curious. Is there a specific reason why the trend for our use of the English language went towards this direction, when in the past, a lot of the historical material I read seemed intentionally verbose? Sure, it's all for ensuring we are understood better among ourselves, but I wonder if writing this way makes us cognitively simpler.

Maybe in the past, written material was consumed by the elite, educated fraction of the population, and this was a way to "show off" their knowledge. Today, reading is accessible to a much broader percentage of people who may not all be as educated.

> written material was consumed by the elite, educated fraction of the population, and this was a way to "show off" their knowledge

One notes that even in letters sent home from American and Western European wars in the 19th century, the common soldiers who wrote those letters often used much more elaborate sentence structures than today, even though they were from the peasantry and had not received more than a rudimentary schooling.