“I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.” - Mark Twain
My best writing is my most concise.
Uncommon words are more “salt to taste” for me, everyone has a different palette.
What makes writing more readable?
41–50 of 113 posts
Re: What makes writing more readable?
#42> Kyra is autistic and deaf. She was born early. She was very small when she was born. She has trouble seeing, hearing, eating and sleeping. Her hand shakes so she does not do sign language. Her parents think she knows some signs. This is plain, but is this good writing? Specifically, I find the writing lack of specifics. What is "early"? What is "very small"? What does "has trouble" mean? How bad is the shake? How d…
Agreed. I think it's not good writing. It also doesn't sound natural, it sounds like something written by a robot...
Re: What makes writing more readable?
#43> Kyra is autistic and deaf. She was born early. She was very small when she was born. She has trouble seeing, hearing, eating and sleeping. Her hand shakes so she does not do sign language. Her parents think she knows some signs. This is plain, but is this good writing? Specifically, I find the writing lack of specifics. What is "early"? What is "very small"? What does "has trouble" mean? How bad is the shake? How d…
> This is plain, but is this good writing?
For you and me? No. As a translation for people with intellectual disabilities or people with minimal English skills that the article focuses on? Who knows; it's probably fine.
I just hope that such translations will remain translations and not replace the original.
Re: What makes writing more readable?
#44One of the keys that is missed often is mis-reading the room (so to speak). That is, the material (e.g., a tutorial) is written for people with more (background) experience, not less. If I knew what you knew I wouldn't need your tutorial. Yet there you are speaking to me...right over my head.
Re: What makes writing more readable?
#45Well you can write very simple English and still be difficult to read. This is from Benjamin Jowett's translation of Plato's Parmenides:
> If the one were greater or less than the others, or the others greater or less than the one, they would not be greater or less than each other in virtue of their being the one and the others; but, if in addition to their being what they are they had equality, they would be equal to one another, or if the one had smallness and the others greatness, or the one had greatness and the others smallness — whichever kind had greatness would be greater, and whichever had smallness would be smaller?
The words are easy, the vocabulary is small, the syllable count is low. Still you almost need to break it down and draw a chart to make sense of the sentence.
You might blame the old translation, I've read this material in more modern translations as well and it honestly doesn't get better.
Re: What makes writing more readable?
#46"Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard." - David McCullough I agree with many of the other posts here. Some of the translations highlighted in the article seem to either lose important information or introduce confusing information. The most striking example for me was the translation from > A strong tremor in her hand makes it impossible for her to use American Sign Language…
The "hand shakes" vs. "handshakes" confusion is a known pattern that writers should typically avoid. It even has a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence
Re: What makes writing more readable?
#47According to this article, it seems that the way to convert 'rich' language into 'plain' language is to split it into lots and lots of small 'subject-verb-object'-style sentences.
[presses 'p']
This is an article. It has language. The language is 'rich'. 'Rich' language can be converted to 'plain' language. 'Rich' language has sentences. 'Plain' language has sentences too, but they are smaller. 'Plain' sentences usually look like "I do something", e.g. "George eats fruit". A 'rich' sentence can be split into 'smaller' sentences. 'Rich' sentences can be split into smaller 'plain' ones that look like "George eats fruit".
Hesitation. I am being honest. Do I fully agree, or not? I am not sure! More hesitation.
[unpresses 'p']
Hm ... I'm not sure if I fully agree or not to be honest...
Re: What makes writing more readable?
#48"Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard." - David McCullough I agree with many of the other posts here. Some of the translations highlighted in the article seem to either lose important information or introduce confusing information. The most striking example for me was the translation from > A strong tremor in her hand makes it impossible for her to use American Sign Language…
I'd like to add another citation from Nicolas Boileau (17th century) that my father used to tell me frequently: "Whatever is well conceived is clearly said, And the words to say it flow with ease." ("Ce que l'on conçoit bien s'énonce clairement, et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément.") I think about it often especially when someone tries to explain something and it seems hard, very often this means it's also har…
We used to say it often in class, and we (or the teacher) would sometimes ironically trip on that very sentence :)
Re: What makes writing more readable?
#49According to this article, it seems that the way to convert 'rich' language into 'plain' language is to split it into lots and lots of small 'subject-verb-object'-style sentences. [presses 'p'] This is an article. It has language. The language is 'rich'. 'Rich' language can be converted to 'plain' language. 'Rich' language has sentences. 'Plain' language has sentences too, but they are smaller. 'Plain' sentences usua…
Sorry, fully aware I'm being unnecessarily reductive and possibly slightly rude here, but you get what I mean ... :p
Re: What makes writing more readable?
#50It's interesting that the article itself isn't written in plain language, using idioms such as "posing a barrier" and many others which, according to a strict application of these rules, should be removed in favor of plainer forms [EDIT: as others have pointed out, I completely missed that you can switch the whole article to simple style. How embarrassing!] I agree with some simplifications, e.g. "profoundly deaf" is…
It seems like maybe you missed the "swap for the plain language version" gimmick of the overall article.
I missed over the one in the header (I blame header blindness) but realized that there was alternate text on the side to the paragraphs. Now that I understand the plain text swap at the top, that's a neat way of representing it and I understand the feature a bit better.