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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...
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?"
"Build out" instead of just build.
"Actionable" - although it is a real word, it is a legal term, not a synonym of practical.
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> Don't make your readers hold parts of the sentence in their head. Funny to read this as I'm learning German! In German the main verb of a sentence has to be at the end depending on the context (e.g: if it is a question, or following some prepositions such as "dass"). Let's say we want to build a question, it will be constructed this way: 1. question marker (such as "Was", "Wo", "Warum", etc) 2. subject 3. other det…
A famously playful version of this is the first sentence of Kafka's Metamophorphosis. The reader has the concept of Gregor Samsa waking in his bed from uneasy dreams and then a monstrous vermin in their heads, and the verb they're definitely not expecting to link this subject and object is 'transformed into'... It's a pain for the translator to pull off the same effect in most other languages.
Haha, that's a nice one, thanks for sharing :)
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Experienced UX practitioners will immediately note that a surprisingly large proportion of users don't actually know how old they are; furthermore, of those that do, another significant segment will (intentionally or otherwise) mis-state their age, date of birth etc. This problem is further exacerbated by the wide variety of temporal arithmetic possibilities any such workflow might adopt. The solution is to either co…
> a surprisingly large proportion of users don't actually know how old they are How did they manage this? I've tried every way I can think of forgetting my age, to no avail -the bastard number is always there :)
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Bump. Yes, why the ominous copyright? It's plain silly.
I think the best (worst?) copyright notice is the following from Ken Rockwell[0]: "As this page is copyrighted and formally registered, it is unlawful to make copies, especially in the form of printouts for personal use. If you wish to make a printout for personal use, you are granted one-time permission only if you PayPal me $5.00 per printout or part thereof. Thank you!" [0] https://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/fart.ht…
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> For example, readers tend to latch onto the last part of a sentence. Everything before "but" is often bullshit. "I'm not racist, but". "No offense, but".
Maybe not the best example, as it is hard to imagine someone being nice and beating the dog, but the point still stands if you pick up something less extreme: "John is a good friend but forgets my birthday every year".
Another example: "Boris Johnson is a woefully inadequate Prime Minister but he was kind of funny 20 years ago on Have I Got News For You".
It's almost like weighing Negative Fact #1 against Positive Fact #2 and suggesting to the audience that the scales are now more or less level so let's move on.
Obviously the 2 facts are a long way from being really "equal", and how one applies the offset (minor bad vs major good, major bad vs minor good, etc) should be influenced by what one is trying to achieve.
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I like how they banned "empower" with no added explanation while the Rust team was bending backwards to argue that there is nothing wrong with the word when, in 2018, they controversially changed their motto to "A language empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software." ( https://rust-lang.org/ ) Obviously gov.uk material is of a different nature than that of a corporate motto, but it speaks to the exa…
What's wrong with 'empower'?
The article doesn't mention the way that word placement changes the meaning of sentences. From a video I recently saw but can't recall, consider these sentences: - Although John is a nice guy, he beats his dog. - Although John beats his dog, he's a nice guy. - John is a nice guy, but he beats his dog. - John beats his dog, but he's a nice guy. These are all plain English sentences, but will be interpreted quite diffe…
I'm struggling to read those as being different. UK English reader.
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> a surprisingly large proportion of users don't actually know how old they are How did they manage this? I've tried every way I can think of forgetting my age, to no avail -the bastard number is always there :)
I'm in my twenties. Sometimes I forget my age. Only ever by one year -- I just don't remember if my birthday passed or not. Kind of like in January when write oit today's date and accidentally use the previous year. After a few mistakes, your brain adjusts and you start using the right one. Same thing for my age, except that I don't actually think about my age very often; it hasn't mattered much since I passed 21.
I’ve started doing similar now. I don’t often recall my age or the number of years my wife and I have been married, or, heck, even our kid’s ages. But I recall all the years and dates. In this way, I more easily appear to recall the right value.
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> a surprisingly large proportion of users don't actually know how old they are How did they manage this? I've tried every way I can think of forgetting my age, to no avail -the bastard number is always there :)
I've no idea of my precise age.