self-plug: let's you explore which English words are the most common
The Long Tail of the English Language http://blog.wordsapi.com/2015/01/the-long-tail-of-english-la...
The Controlled Natural Language of Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer [pdf]
51–60 of 94 posts
Re: The Controlled Natural Language of Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer [pdf]
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
The text editor is here: http://xkcd.com/simplewriter/ Try it! 1,000 words is an unrealistic constraint. But I'm amazed how often I use a complex word when the simple alternative is better. Or... Sticking to 1,000 words is hard. But doing it often makes my writing better.
The constraint made me realize that the complex word isn't that helpful when the other person doesn't know much behind the word. You need to get inventive, and at some point, you might start having fun. I used this to explain encryption, and from the feedback I've got, I seem to have done a good job. It gets repetitive at times, but I managed to slip in PKI, password storage, and a brief summary of the Crypto Wars. h…
That's pretty well done, actually. Personally, I would add an addendum at the end that breaks out of the ten hundred most commonly used words and actually introduces the reader to the terms you're dancing around.
Re: The Controlled Natural Language of Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer [pdf]
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it's possible to form non-trivial sentences without function words. But leaving out common content words could be interesting.
Someone wrote a 260 pages long novel without using a single word that contains the letter 'e'. That seems impossible to me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_%28novel%29
There are multiple examples. It is difficult but apparently not so difficult that nobody attempts it. The accepted term for texts like that is "lipogram"; it's a popular form of the broader category of constrained writing.
Wikipedia has a page for "logology" which is apparently a term for the general activity of playing with language in that kind of way on a per-letter basis (so, including anagrams and palindromes, etc.)
Re: The Controlled Natural Language of Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer [pdf]
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it's possible to form non-trivial sentences without function words. But leaving out common content words could be interesting.
Someone wrote a 260 pages long novel without using a single word that contains the letter 'e'. That seems impossible to me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_%28novel%29
If you sort all English words by frequency, the ones that contain 'e' would be distributed more or less randomly, so it seems more doable. Banning the first 1000 would prevent you from using the most useful words. I don't think you could construct sentences that wouldn't sound totally weird.
Re: The Controlled Natural Language of Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer [pdf]
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
To me, language is wielded with dual intention: (1) to convey meaning ("A thorough lecturer") & (2) to convey meaning in a pleasing manner to the listener ("A good lecturer"). Expanding vocabulary to accentuate (2) by necessity compromises (1) for classes of listeners / readers who are not familiar with that vocabulary superset . Which decomposes the optimization problem to "Who is my audience and what is their comfo…
Rare words can make writing more efficient and enjoyable. But it doesn't always. To my ears: "I use language for two reasons:" Is better than "To me, language is wielded with dual intention" But I always enjoy the word "florid", even though it's not in the top 1000 words.
Indeed. Efficient use of language can be far more compelling than florid prose. Of course, it can also be more difficult to convey the same meaning tersely, hence the old quote (who's source I forget, and I'm likely mangling) "I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one".
Re: The Controlled Natural Language of Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer [pdf]
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
The constraint made me realize that the complex word isn't that helpful when the other person doesn't know much behind the word. You need to get inventive, and at some point, you might start having fun. I used this to explain encryption, and from the feedback I've got, I seem to have done a good job. It gets repetitive at times, but I managed to slip in PKI, password storage, and a brief summary of the Crypto Wars. h…
That's pretty well done, actually. Personally, I would add an addendum at the end that breaks out of the ten hundred most commonly used words and actually introduces the reader to the terms you're dancing around.
That's a great idea!
"Now you know what's going on, here are some words that make it easier to talk about."
Re: The Controlled Natural Language of Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer [pdf]
#57I thought Thing Explainer is a fun experiment and a delightful book, but as an attempt (and it isn't a serious attempt) to use only simple and super-commonly-used language, it doesn't hit the home base. As I speak English as my second language I'm acutely aware of this. Thing explainer uses the 1000 most commonly used lemmas, but words have multiple senses, and some of them are commonly used and some are not. From a…
The text editor is here: http://xkcd.com/simplewriter/ Try it! 1,000 words is an unrealistic constraint. But I'm amazed how often I use a complex word when the simple alternative is better. Or... Sticking to 1,000 words is hard. But doing it often makes my writing better.
I would love this editor with a heatmap instead of a hard cutoff at 1,000 words. So common words are green, less common ones turn yellow, and rare ones are orange to red. That would be really nice in highlighting parts of a text that are unnecessarily more complicated than the rest.
Re: The Controlled Natural Language of Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer [pdf]
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
In this case the phrase is a more artistic way of describing the beginning of a fight. Think of "John set upon Mike angrily" as John set, or selected, Mike as his target. It's also a great example of the topic at hand because the same phrase could be used like "The book was set upon the table." Describing a book that was placed on a table. Each version uses the same common vocabulary, to describe wildly different thi…
Or, John was set upon going to the movies tonight, but his friend refused to join him. Admittedly, that sounds a bit old-fashioned.
Honestly any use of upon sounds old-fashioned. It's generally been replaced by on, except in a few contexts by up. Even Google defines it as "a more formal term for on".
Re: The Controlled Natural Language of Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer [pdf]
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wasn't familiar with that tool, so I put a few of my last HipChat messages in there to see how I faired. Once I removed specific words or proper nouns, I still didn't do all that well. Even the preceding sentence had four problem words, and I'm pretty sure "preceding" would join them. I agree, sticking to 1,000 words is hard. But I don't think I agree that it makes the writing better. I look at language as a form o…
To me, language is wielded with dual intention: (1) to convey meaning ("A thorough lecturer") & (2) to convey meaning in a pleasing manner to the listener ("A good lecturer"). Expanding vocabulary to accentuate (2) by necessity compromises (1) for classes of listeners / readers who are not familiar with that vocabulary superset . Which decomposes the optimization problem to "Who is my audience and what is their comfo…
It's
1. Convey meaning
2. Establish social/tribal register - which can be done in inclusive (welcoming) or exclusive (aggressive) ways.
I think elegant, beautiful English peaked in the 1950s. I have a small collection of books from that period about various topics. They're all written in an effortlessly understated and unaffected English style that seems to have vanished now.
George Orwell's essays have some of the same quality.
At the other extreme, academic arts literature can be particularly bad, because the wilder fringes of (e.g.) critical theory seem to have developed a cargo cult vocabulary that primarily exists for social signalling, not for communication - while, ironically, spending a lot of time discussing social signalling.
When it's so easy to hack together an academic paper generator [1][2] and no one is much the wiser, it's clear that communication is no longer the point.
[1] http://bocktherobber.com/2010/05/post-modernism-generator/ [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2014/feb/26...
Re: The Controlled Natural Language of Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer [pdf]
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
The text editor is here: http://xkcd.com/simplewriter/ Try it! 1,000 words is an unrealistic constraint. But I'm amazed how often I use a complex word when the simple alternative is better. Or... Sticking to 1,000 words is hard. But doing it often makes my writing better.
I would love this editor with a heatmap instead of a hard cutoff at 1,000 words. So common words are green, less common ones turn yellow, and rare ones are orange to red. That would be really nice in highlighting parts of a text that are unnecessarily more complicated than the rest.
I want this, but not (immediately) for my own writing - I want to run papers through it, especially those in the soft sciences.