71–80 of 327 posts
Reminds me of Wikipedia's "simple English" approach. I think the difference is, that simple or basic English only uses the 1000 most common words.
This article explains how, but it doesn’t explain why: you should do this because it’s an accessibility issue. NHS Digital came up with a good example of this problem: https://digital.nhs.uk/blog/transformation-blog/2019/pee-and...
Saying the reason is “accessibility” suggests that it only helps people with poor literacy. There are two things to note: 1. Most people writing content will assume that their readers are like themselves or their social circle and will therefore have good literacy skills. However the actual proportion of people with poor (or even just not high) literacy skills is much higher than you might estimate from your social c…
> Research shows that higher literacy people prefer plain English because it allows them to understand the information as quickly as possible.
> For example, research into use of specialist legal language in legal documents found:
> 80% of people preferred sentences written in clear English - and the more complex the issue, the greater that preference (for example, 97% preferred ‘among other things’ over the Latin ‘inter alia’)
> the more educated the person and the more specialist their knowledge, the greater their preference for plain English
> People understand complex specialist language, but do not want to read it if there’s an alternative. This is because people with the highest literacy levels and the greatest expertise tend to have the most to read. They do not have time to pore through reams of dry, complicated prose.
someone linked this above: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/content-design/writing-for-gov-u...
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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 rudim…
Letters from HMRC are amazing. The first time it is really shocking, but after a while it's almost a pleasure to be asked to send money to the Queen!
But I think one of the reason bureaucracies prefer writing jargon and long winded sentences is to protect their influence and necessity. If you write in plain English (or French), then there's little room for interpretation. Good for the reader, but not for the sender. Ambiguity is power.
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.
"unnecessary verbosity" is just one way to express your position in the society. Wearing impractical clothes, complex etiquette, having pale skin and speaking in certain manner was something that requires either wealth or practise.
Today business jargon combined with clothes and behaviour still work today as signalling your identity. So is wearing hoodie and saying "bro" constantly. People learn to feel comfortable in the uniform and in the language they identify with.
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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.
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someone could write a simple grammar checker that looks for words in that list, passive voices, sentence length and whatnot and suggests alternatives. It wouldn't work without human oversight but then again, no automated checker really does.
http://www.hemingwayapp.com/
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?"
Pre-booking is the initial step before a complete booking.
Something not written there: don't use acronyms Acronyms are a plague, especially in technical documents. These documents may include a glossary, which it better than nothing, but if an acronym is only used once or twice in a document, why not use the full name instead? Here is a couple of anecdotes: - I once overheard a heated argument between a project manager and some over guy who criticized his work. Turned out,…