31–40 of 99 posts
I try to post this advice in every similar thread: if you want to get better at communicating information through writing, then On Writing Well by William Zinsser is really worth your time.
I'm a little perplexed as to why professors and other academic staff have routinely hard to read websites. Yes I'm aware I can bump up the font size, but especially on mobile that gets annoying. It's one thing if they don't have a stylesheet what so ever, it's a fully another thing to intentionally make things hard to read: font-family: arial,verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small; From an article that expressly advoca…
> Avoid excessive parenthesized remarks as they make the text hard to read chuckles nervously in Lisp
Maybe it's the nesting that's the problem? Like, refactor it out into its own function/paragraph?
Vale is an OSS tool that you can use as a "prose linter" with many of these rules. You can also write your own rules. Together with a spellchecker its a good replacement for proprietary tools like grammarly. - https://github.com/errata-ai/vale
Are you aware of any academic writing focused extensions for Vale? In specific, I would need different "style" as it's called on Grammarly.
When I was doing my PhD, I was really in love with such guides. There is also the book Bugs in Writing by Lyn Dupré. Looking back I'm not so sure about the utility in scientific writing. Every research community has its own jargon. If don't stick to it, you're going to have a hard time. Today, I very much enjoy these again because most writing happens in a blog. I would add to that list (not original from me): - Dang…
Longer than when it's not a Saturday
One of my pet peeves is when the writer uses a pronoun immediately after a sentence with multiple proper nouns. For example, something like "Biden ran against Trump in 2020, and he raised a lot of money".
> Avoid use of passive tense if at all possible. Example: "In each reservation request message, a refresh interval used by the sender is included." reads better and shorter as "Each ... message includes ..." To which I submit the following article as a rebuttal: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.html . Oh well, at least this person seems somewhat more consistent than most in following his own rule.
There must be places for reasonable use of the passive. Not everything is advertising copy.
Active voice is much better in situations such as contracts where the identity of actors is critical (e.g. 'X is responsible for writing the software while Y will maintain the software after delivery')
> If you find yourself saying "In other words," it means you didn't say it clearly enough the first time. Go back and rewrite the first attempt. Sometimes, particularly in didactic material, it helps to explain things in more than one way, as different people may find different explanations helpful.
Tell them what you are going to tell them.
Tell them what you want to tell them.
Tell them what you just told them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because they have better things to do than tinkering with the latest HTML technology.
font-size: 1.2rem; that is considered the latest HTML technology?
I'm a little perplexed as to why professors and other academic staff have routinely hard to read websites. Yes I'm aware I can bump up the font size, but especially on mobile that gets annoying. It's one thing if they don't have a stylesheet what so ever, it's a fully another thing to intentionally make things hard to read: font-family: arial,verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small; From an article that expressly advoca…