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What makes writing more readable?

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Re: What makes writing more readable?

#61

Post by hintymad »

azangru wrote: post #43
hintymad wrote: post #40

> 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.

> As a translation for people with intellectual disabilities or people with minimal English skills that the article focuses on

Thanks for pointing it out. My bad. I missed this context. I thought the article was talking about good writing with plain English.

Re: What makes writing more readable?

#62

Post by randcraw »

"Plain speaking" is essentially writing for a audience with third grade reading skills. That is a losing proposition for most readers who will suffer the loss of basic information and nuance that plainspeaking entails. I believe this includes many who are now (imprecisely) labeled "disabled", like intelligent blind or deaf native English speakers or non-English speakers who value subtlety but don't want to be talked down to.

Fortunately, with the recent development of powerful natural language computer models, it is now possible to translate any writing into a simplified form using no more computing power than is available in any cell phone.

Therefore, I'd like to propose that "writing inclusively for the masses" is actually undesirable due to the inherent loss of information and style, and is unnecessary due to a rise of tech advances recently.

IMO, a better way to serve all readers is to write clearly and unambiguously in richer natural language. Then for those who desire simplification, the text can be translated into "plainspeak" as needed, using a tool tuned to perform that task, like Babelfish or Google Translate. I suspect a browser plugin also could do this for user-markedup blocks of text.

Re: What makes writing more readable?

#64

Post by marginalia_nu »

Nadya wrote: post #53
marginalia_nu wrote: post #45

Well 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…

That excerpt reads to me much like explaining how a guidance system works on a missile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZe5J8SVCYQ > The missile knows where it is at all times. It knows this because it knows where it isn't. By subtracting where it is from where it isn't, or where it isn't from where it is (whichever is greater), it obtains a difference, or deviation. The guidance subsystem uses deviations to generat…

A lot of the difficulty in the Parmenides case is that it's discussing a lot of the same concepts that appear in the discussion, such as sameness and difference.

As an aside, I do contracting work for the Swedish public sector, and come in contact with an interesting conflict of needs. They have a mandate to use easy language, but also a need for specific legal terms. As a result, they've started overloading specific meanings on common words, making sentences appear understandable (the words are simple), but really easy to misunderstand (because half the words don't mean what you would think).

I'm not sure what's a good solution to this.

Re: What makes writing more readable?

#65

Post by Rayhem »

b3morales wrote: post #28

This may be a nitpick. But the article repeatedly uses a short acronym that has a very common alternate meaning. That seems like an excellent example of something to avoid. Doubly so if you're concerned about clarity for people with lower English skill levels. "People with ID" means "people with identification " to me. My brain was thrown off by that phrase even in the plain version of the third and fourth paragraphs…

I've often seen academics abbreviate their (highly uncommon) jargon in their papers and, short of a very firm length requirement, I don't understand why. My brain has to stop and parse it out every time I see it if the acronym isn't super common, and if you just prefer "QDs" to "quantum dots" because it's less typing then a) maybe writing papers shouldn't be the cornerstone of your profession and b) this is pretty much exactly what LaTeX macros are for.

Re: What makes writing more readable?

#66

Post by lucideer »

Maybe it's out-of-scope but the article seems to ignore a question: what benefits are there to making writing "less readable" (or at least to write without prioritising readability).

The fact that this article has been written twice (and defaults to the "less readable" version) implies there may be some reasons. Perhaps the only reason this was done here is to provide more contrasting examples?

Ultimately, I think the rules of readability here are mostly well-known (by writers) - Orwell famously codified similar rules in Politics & The English Language. But I think writers choose to ignore them for certain reasons & that seems worth exploring.

Re: What makes writing more readable?

#67

Post by nonrandomstring »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #54

Surprised no one has mentioned Flesch-Kincaid yet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readabi... There's also social register. More complex writing/speaking assumes knowledge of cultural markers which are intended to exclude those who aren't familiar with them. So writers/readers can use them as caste markers. Simplification has to be a mix of as-simple-as-possible with as-neutral-as-possible. I don…

> I like the info pages on the UK NHS site. They're as uncomplicated as they can be, they get the key facts across, but they're also very neutral.

Not just NHS, all of UK .gov online, leaflets and telephone services have adopted a super high standard of communication in recent years. Compared to the deliberately twisted legalese for tax, benefits, and services in the 1980s it's a huge transformation. Something has changed in the core culture.

Re: What makes writing more readable?

#68

Post by Rayhem »

tpoacher wrote: post #47

According 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…

> Hm ... I'm not sure if I fully agree or not to be honest...

The comments here seem to agree, but I'm not sure, either. I think there's merit to simplifying the structure like this, but, at the risk of projecting my own brain onto the population, these small "bullet point" sentences eliminate a lot of the _flow_ that I depend on to connect ideas together. Variety in the sentence structure, particularly length, keeps things novel enough that I don't get sucked into reading "automatically" (where I've technically read the words but digested none of them), and connecting words like because, moreover, thus, etc. give me clues about how the bullet points connect together. How one fact or statement follows from the previous.

Re: What makes writing more readable?

#69

Post by jbandela1 »

> Kyra is autistic and profoundly deaf. She was born premature at about 27 weeks, just a little over 2 pounds, which has impacted pretty much everything: eyesight, hearing, digestion, sleep patterns. A strong tremor in her hand makes it impossible for her to use American Sign Language. Her parents think she recognizes a couple dozen signs.

The most important thing when writing is to know your audience. Given the goal the original ProPublica article (talking about how the the state of Arizona is not helping disabled children) the original paragraph is preferable because it succinctly and clearly communicates how serious Kyra’s problem is.

In the first sentence, “profoundly deaf” has a specific meaning and conveys the seriousness of the disability. Similarly, 27 weeks is a lot more helpful than “born early”. Many children are born before 40 weeks (early) and generally anything after 36 weeks (after the lungs have developed) is pretty uncomplicated. However, 27 weeks is very early and has a high complication rate and requires state of the art neonatal intensive care. In addition, 2 pounds is very small for a baby(average is around 7 pounds) and again requires a lot of high tech medical care just to survive until what would be full term.

In addition the words “tremor” combined with “impossible” conveys the severe medical nature of the problem more so than “shaking”. In addition, with the simple version, it is ambiguous whether using sign language is because of preference (self-conscious) or because it is impossible.

Again consider the goals of the original article. It is to point out the injustice that a child with a severe medical problem is not getting the care and help she requires and deserves. The original wording does a much better job of making this case.

The most important thing in writing is knowing your audience and your goal.

Re: What makes writing more readable?

#70

Post by feoren »

scythmic_waves wrote: post #20

"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…

Agreed. I found the first sentence immediately understandable, and the second one confusing and ambiguous.

> A strong tremor in her hand

The fact that "tremor" is uncommon helped me instantly understand that this was a medical condition, and "strong" helped me understand that it's debilitating for her. It sounds long-lived, if not permanent.

> Her hand shakes

Ok ... is it a medical condition, or a nervous tick, or just a bad habit? Is it really strong or just a light, well, tremor? And of course as you pointed out, the confusion with with other words like "handshake", and the fact that "shakes" is transitive, so we could be about to read "Her hand shakes the salt shaker". "Tremor" is not transitive, so my mind doesn't need to leave open a branch that could accept another noun as part of it.

> [condition] makes it impossible for her to ...

Ok, her condition is really bad. We should not expect her to be able to lots of other things, either. Please don't ask her about it; it could be embarrassing.

> [condition] so she does not do ...

"so" should have a comma before it. "Her hand shakes so" is actually a complete sentence, which leaves room for "Her hand shakes so; she does not do" as being more separable thoughts rather than one being the consequence of the other. This is yet another possible "branch" of the sentence that my mind has to leave open while trying to understand it.

She does not do it? That is so much more ambiguous than "it is impossible for her".

The only possible improvement is the omission of the word "American", but that's not even clear: it gives us additional information about the subject (i.e., she is American) since it's already clear that any sign language would be hard for her.

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