Writing clearly is like playing Tetris. Sentences should be presented with clauses that drop down and slot together efficiently. At the earliest available opportunity you drop in a block that completes the line and points are won/made.
This can also make for rather dull writing and I appreciate the irony in this paragraph:
> However, at first you may still find yourself writing the odd long sentence, especially when trying to explain a complicated point. But most long sentences can be broken up in some way.
Here we see the Tetris player drop a sequence of blocks leaving a 3x1 gap down the left edge. Where are they going with this? More blocks stack up on the middle and right, there are “bubbles” in the pile that are covered by squares and there’s still that annoying gap on the left holding them back from clearing. Time passes. The screen is now getting dangerously full.
Then they drop in a pair of 4x1 blocks that completes rows 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6. The bubbles on rows 4 and 7 become exposed making a T shaped hole. The next block to fall is a T shape. The screen clears, the sentence’s cognitive buffer is flushed, and we move on to the next point.
Somehow, this single expression made me finally (after reading beginning of it) understand your post better. Before that expression had hit my apprehension, the post read like "what is he on about?".
Perhaps needless to point out, but this is quite a beautiful thing you've done there: the expression itself works as the very thing it describes, in the context of your post. Within the post, that expression is the T-shaped block, - the thing that clears the buffer and makes all the collected blocks all make sense together.
Don't make your readers hold parts of the sentence in their head. Reorder or split sentences until it can be avoided. In other words, use a really small buffer.
"You must fill form 331 unless you are over 60 years old, in which case you must fill form 445."
"You must fill form 331. If you are over 60 years old, you must fill 445 instead."
"If you are over 60 years old, you must fill form 445. Otherwise, you must fill form 331."
You might have noticed that the last version is an if-else statement.
Your last one requires keeping the first clause of the first sentence in your head; just because you've split sentences doesn't mean you've avoided that, because “otherwise” imports the conditional in the previous sentence by reference and then inverts it. To actually avoid requiring the reader to keep sentence parts in their head, use if-then or do-if constructs, but not if-then-else constructs.
“Complete form 445 if you are over 60 years old. Complete form 331 if you are 60 years old or younger.”
I disagree. Putting the "if" clause first means you can skip this sentence. In other words, the if-sentences are guard clauses to the default option (fill form 331).
In other words, it's not really an if-else block, but just an if statement before the default scenario. Almost everyone has to fill form 331.
I think the sentence structure you suggest would quickly make a longer text tedious to read. I have experimented with that sentence format, and it added a lot of text, but not a lot of clarity.
I also think that putting the if statement at the end makes little sense, just like when reading code.
That's a bad example of how to express age limits. If I've just had my 60th birthday, or perhaps today is my birthday, which applies, or do I have to fill in both forms?
Also, is it my age at the time I sign the form, or my age at the time the form is received, that matters? Arguably that's a problem with the rule itself rather than how it's expressed. It's better if you can write something like: "If you were born before 6 April 1960 ... otherwise ...". Note that "after 6 Apr 1960" is arguably more ambiguous than "before 6 Apr 1960" because there's a slight risk that someone could interpret "6 Apr 1960" as meaning 1960-04-06 00:00:00.
This problem is vaguely related to the insurance policy renewals that leave a one-minute gap between the old policy and the new policy, and even more vaguely related to the ambiguity of "midnight on the next day".
Oh man I'm having day nightmare flashbacks about the time I spent days parsing some well-meant European Energy-Saving directive and figuring out whether we could sell a PC with a fixed-frequency CPU, and all power- and energy-saving features disabled (latency concerns). Ouch... There were some official and unofficial logic diagrams and they made things even worse. Lexicon was pretty vague, use-cases too, exceptions too... and you end up writing some kind of justification for you being one of the special cases and praying it's OK. And it wasn't even the worst normative document I've ever read. It was clear about the spirit of the directive...
Imprecise language to allow flexibility and 'let the judges decide'... I'm not sure I'm comfortable with common-law-inspired regulation.
> It's better if you can write something like: "If you were born before 6 April 1960 ... otherwise ...". Note that "after 6 Apr 1960" is arguably more ambiguous than "before 6 Apr 1960" because there's a slight risk that someone could interpret "6 Apr 1960" as meaning 1960-04-06 00:00:00.
I strongly prefer pairing “before” and “on or after” (or “on or before” with “after”) when it comes to dates. “On <date>” is widely and conventionally understood to encompass the entire day, and it seems to make it far less likely than with after/before alone with “otherwise” that people will trip up over boundary conditions. But the right phrasing is highly sensitive to the context and the underlying rule; if it's an age based rule and you have fixed text that doesn't dynamically adjust by dates you can't use date-based language even if it would be clearer.
Overflowing that buffer really does feel like a stack overflow, too. Your whole mental state just suddenly disappears in a puff of smoke.
This resplendent sentence in the Vulkan spec did it to me the other day:
The layout of subresources of images on other logical devices that are bound to VkDeviceMemory objects associated with the same underlying memory resources as external memory objects on the lost device becomes VK_IMAGE_LAYOUT_UNDEFINED.
I got about half way through and suddenly discovered I didn't know where I was, what year it was or my name.
A lot of philosophy essays are written as part of the writer being in the process of trying to figure things out for themselves, without quite having gotten there yet.
A meeting of faculty heads is taking place. The topic - funding. The chairman says: "Hey, physicists, why are you so expensive? You need all those gadgets and materials to perform your experiments. Look at the mathematicians. All they need to produce a research paper are a box of paper, a box of pencils, and a trash can."
"We don't even need trash cans, sir." announces the dean of Philosophy.
I don’t think we’d see the difference if everybody had roughly the same number. Ive seen people who have a few more slots than average and it appears quite inpressive, they keep on stacking up when I already overflow. It’s probably got to do with how they chunk their information though.. But a piece of paper and a pencil can do wonders
That's a lot of qualified noun phrases. This should just be an s-expression. It's already one, honestly, but without the right parenthesis.
(becomes (qualified (layout of subresources of images on other logical devices) (bound . (same-memory-resources (VkDeviceMemory objects) (external memory objects on the lost device)))) VK_IMAGE_LAYOUT_UNDEFINED)
Will natural-language tools eventually help us turn these puddles of nouns into reasonable sentences?
Trying to rewrite that sentence so it's comprehensible is an interesting exercise. How about this?
(I don't know anything about Vulkan, and there is some ambiguity in the quoted sentence, so I've given a few different versions with different meanings. Note that the ambiguity is not necessarily a flaw in the quoted sentence -- it may be perfectly unambiguous, albeit very unclear, to anyone with any knowledge of Vulkan.)
If a device is lost, the subresources of some images on other logical devices may have their layout become VK_IMAGE_LAYOUT_UNDEFINED. This happens if the VkDeviceMemory object to which the image is bound is associated with the same underlying memory resources as an external memory object on the lost device.
... or, if an image isn't necessarily bound to exactly one VkDeviceMemory object, ...
If a device is lost, the subresources of some images on other logical devices may have their layouts become VK_IMAGE_LAYOUT_UNDEFINED. This happens if the image is bound to a VkDeviceMemory object which is associated with the same underlying memory resources as an external memory object on the lost device.
... or, if it's the other logical device bound to a VkDeviceMemory object rather than the image:
If a device is lost, the subresources of images on other logical devices may have their layouts become VK_IMAGE_LAYOUT_UNDEFINED. This happens if the other device is bound to a VkDeviceMemory object which is associated with the same underlying memory resources as an external memory object on the lost device.
Or maybe a slightly different structure. "If a device is lost, and some VkDeviceMemory object is associated with hte same underlying memory resources as an external memory object on that lost device, then all subresources of any image bound to that VkDeviceMemory object have their layout set to VK_IMAGE_LAYOUT_UNDEFINED."
But I can't help thinking that this really wants a diagram. Nodes for the logical devices, the images, the VkDeviceMemory object, the "underlying memory resources", the external memory object. Labelled arrows for relationships like "bound to", "has as underlying memory resource", "is a subresource of", etc.
And it seems as if this business of "having your layout set to VK_IMAGE_LAYOUT_UNDEFINED" deserves a name. (Naming things is a powerful general technique for reducing cognitive stack overflows.)
"Under some circumstances, the memory resources associated with an image may be invalidated, in which case all subresources of the image will have layout VK_IMAGE_LAYOUT_INVALIDATED and [explain here the consequences of that]. In this case, the image is said to be layout-invalidated. " ... And then later, when talking about lost devices, you say "If a device is lost, images on other logical devices may be layout-invalidated. This happens when the image is bound to a VkDeviceMemory object, and that object is associated with the same underlying memory resources as an external memory object on the lost device."
Most of the time if someone speaks to me in a non-casual context, my brain is constantly navigating the pathing process you describe. Although language is often not ambiguous, most people do not make their meaning as explicit as necessary to avoid confusion.
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 combine the forms, or (in an interactive context) ask the user if they were born before 1960, then give them the right form.
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.
A colleague of a old friend would recall your birth year (and date?) to know your age. It is a value about you that doesn’t change and then you can derive the age.
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.
> 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 details regarding the subject (adjectives and others)
4. the verb, with correct grammatical form depending on the subject
Something I find quite frustrating is that I have to keep in mind everything about the subject during the entire duration of the sentence just to be able to use the verb correctly. So because of this I always try to keep the distance between a subject and the verb as short as possible when trying to speak German, which results in very terse sentences that looks similar to what you described.
My life partner speaks native German and doesn't even realize that she does this buffering.
I knew a German to Polish translator and she complained about how hard live translation was when a key part of the sentence is held until the very end.
I learned Dutch, which does the same thing with the verb, and at one point after a few years it just clicked and started feeling natural to structure sentences that way. I've been living abroad long enough that occasionally I catch myself trying to organize English sentences in that way as I'm speaking (which, of course, results in falling flat on my face at the end.)
In Dutch at least, you can imagine these really long sentences which build up details, adding more and more, until they finally surprise you with the verb at the end. But in practice people don't speak that way - the patterns of speech and just the way people use the language in different subtle ways mostly prevents that from happening, in natural ways that don't feel terse. It may be different in academia/legal professions and that sort of thing.
Actually, in Dutch there is quite some flexibility in verb ordering. Teachers actively warn against so-called pliers-constructions where a subordinate clause is wedged between subject and verb.
Example time!
Dutch: "De man die de vrouw die bloemen plukt kust."
Literally: "The man who (the woman (who flowers picks)) kisses"
Meaning: "The man who kisses the woman that is picking flowers"
The subordinate clause is sandwiched between subject and verb. However, Dutch allows the following order:
Dutch: "De man die de vrouw kust die bloemen plukt."
Literally: "The man who (the woman) kisses (who flowers picks)"
In this case the verb kisses has moved to the front. It is a transformation that allows a form of tail recursion elimination. After the main verb the parse stack for the main clause can be popped and all resources dedicated to parsing the trailing subordinate clause(s). This allows us to string together quite a lot of subclauses without getting lost.
> This allows us to string together quite a lot of subclauses without getting lost.
Correct, a sentence like this is quite easy to read:
De man, die gewoonlijk zijn handen afveegt aan zijn broek, besloot dit keer zijn handen af te vegen aan de handdoek die zijn vrouw, die gister nog bloemen aan het plukken was, specifiek hiervoor had neergelegd.
I had a Brazilian roommate who could second this. He (jokingly) complained this was the absolute worst when dealing with split-proposition-verbs:
E. g. "aufgeben" translated part-by-part is "upgive", so "to surrender" or "to give up" in English.
However, in sth. like 3rd position singular, the form would be "er gibt auf" ("he gives up"). But in German, the object goes between "gives" and "up".
Thus, my roommate mentioned a sentence like "Der Präsident gibt sein Versprechen zur Verbesserung der Arbeitslosigkeitsquote auf" (The President gives up his promise about improving unemploymemt rates).
So yeah, parsing German sometimes results a pause while everyone unwinds their stack.
I have in mind an idea for a movie scenario where someone important is on their death bed and says their last words, and nobody can tell what they actually meant because it may be missing the second part of the verb, resulting in a potentially completely different meaning :)
Well, English too has some interesting ideas where to put prepositions in the sentence, that is, turn them basically into postpositions. For example, "Which basket did you put that exquisite marble figurine in?"
The "in" is logically related to "which basket", so one would expect that the question would actually be *"In which basket...", but nope, that's rustic and colloquial at best. I suspect it's because of the word inversion in questions, since in dependent clauses the order is reasonable: "I put the figurine in this woven concrete basket over there".
Could the tension/buffering in that sentence be resolved with something like: "Which basket has got that exquisite marble figurine"? When spoken by a native speaker 'has got' would likely be contracted to "which basket's got"
Sub out 'has got' for 'contains' if you want to be more formal.
Shorten even further to "Exquisite marble figure; which basket?" or "which basket? Exquisite marble figure." Depending on which is more likely to short circuit based on context.
"In which basket did you put that exquisite marble figurine?" is perfectly good English. It sounds better to me that the "which ... in" version. (British English speaker.)
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.
An American woman visiting Berlin - intent on hearing Bismarck speak - obtained two tickets for the Reichstag visitors' gallery and enlisted an interpreter to accompany her.
Soon after their arrival, Bismarck rose and began to speak. The interpreter, however, simply sat listening with intense concentration. The woman, anxious for him to begin translating, nudged and budged him, to no avail.
Finally, unable to control herself any longer, the woman burst out: "What is he saying!?" "Patience, madam," the interpreter replied. "I am waiting for the verb."
>An average sentence, in a German newspaper, is a sublime and impressive curiosity; it occupies a quarter of a column; it contains all the ten parts of speech--not in regular order, but mixed; it is built mainly of compound words constructed by the writer on the spot, and not to be found in any dictionary--six or seven words compacted into one, without joint or seam--that is, without hyphens; it treats of fourteen or fifteen different subjects, each enclosed in a parenthesis of its own, with here and there extra parentheses, making pens with pens: finally, all the parentheses and reparentheses are massed together between a couple of king-parentheses, one of which is placed in the first line of the majestic sentence and the other in the middle of the last line of it--AFTER WHICH COMES THE VERB, and you find out for the first time what the man has been talking about; and after the verb--merely by way of ornament, as far as I can make out--the writer shovels in "HABEN SIND GEWESEN GEHABT HAVEN GEWORDEN SEIN," or words to that effect, and the monument is finished. I suppose that this closing hurrah is in the nature of the flourish to a man's signature--not necessary, but pretty. German books are easy enough to read when you hold them before the looking-glass or stand on your head--so as to reverse the construction--but I think that to learn to read and understand a German newspaper is a thing which must always remain an impossibility to a foreigner.
Reminds me of this excellent sentence of Hofstadter's, on the concept of treating language as a stack composed of clauses and popped by verbs:
"The proverbial German phenomenon of the 'verb-at-the-end', about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nunplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic pushing and popping."
Oh my, yes. Although I disagree, as it's not such a hard thing when you break it down, I'm usually considered a language genius. I am fluent in more than a handful of languages and my travel activity of choice is learning the local language as fast as I can, which starts yielding real results around the 2 week mark. But despite living in Germany for 16 years and having studied it in a bilingual middle school for a handful more, I don't dare near a German newspaper.
Japanese has proven similarly hard, but for completely different reasons.
I’m from Austria, so I speak german, but I don’t think we buffer. We guess through out the sentence what the next part might be and slowly move that assumption to the final meaning of the sentence. That’s why I have to reread a sentence, when I was wrong. Same principle as in jokes.
As someone who is also learning German (Viel Glück!), doesn't the verb always go into the second position unless:
1. It's an infinitive verb, perfect verb, or a verb in a subclause, in which case it goes to the end.
2. You're asking a question without a question word (i.e. "Can you" or "Will you") or issuing a command, in which case the verb moves to the beginning).
Examples:
Verb in second position:
> "Was willst du" -> What do you want?
Infinitive verb at the end of the clause:
> "Ich will mit dir reden" -> I want to talk to you
Conjugated verb at the end of a subclause:
> "Kannst du mir versprechen, dass du mich nie verlassen -wirst?" -> Can you promise you will never leave me
Just to clarify, I'm not any sort of authority on this. Merely trying to double check my own understanding as I continue on my language learning journey :)
Pretty much! However, as such it's really only second in simple present and preterite statements, which are actually sort of rare outside of really simple sentences.
In light of that, the default German construction is effectively verb-last. (separable prefixes moving to the end exacerbates this need for buffering too)
Good point! The separable verb things is super strange for me as a native English speaker. I haven't internalized the meaning for any separable verbs so whenever I see them in text, I usually end up having to re-read or re-listen to the text with the knowledge in mind to actually get the meaning.
Or just have a proper online form that asks for your DoB and leads you through entry of the necessary info.
FWIW in UK 'must' in gov advice indicates a legal obligation. It annoys me no end when such obligations are not supported by references to legislation: as then I can't check if they've been correctly interpreted.
I did start adding little calculators and utilities in my articles, but those only make sense because I have a lot of free time.
I heavily cite sources, so at least you'd know the exact paragraph in the law that supports it. It's something my competitors neglect, and it makes it hard to tell facts apart from hearsay.
The worst of the three versions you've given is the second, as it makes use of a sentence which, taken on its own, is a lie.
It's poor writing to state a mistruth and then whittle away at it until you arrive at the truth. Far better to build up truth upon truth until you arrive at the full picture.
Bad:
A natural number greater than 1 cannot be expressed as the product of two smaller natural numbers, if it is prime.
Good:
A prime number is a natural number greater than 1 that is not a product of two smaller natural numbers. (Stolen from Wikipedia.)
My point was there's an additional anti-pattern at play. As the reader progresses through a sentence, they shouldn't have to mentally cross out previously made categorical claims. This isn't quite the same thing as the stack overflow problem.
I'm afraid I don't see your rephrasing as an improvement. It doesn't substantially restructure the sentence, and to someone familiar with the mathematical writing style, it reads less naturally.
I think you gave a good reason why passive voice is preferred in some situations.
To me (I am not a native speaker), the default emphasis is on the first words:
The police stopped the riot. -> emphasis on the police
The riot was stopped by the police. -> emphasis on the riot
It coincides with the examples in which passive voice is recommended.
> To make something less hostile - 'this bill has not been paid' (passive) is softer than 'you have not paid this bill' (active).
> To avoid taking the blame - 'a mistake was made' (passive) rather than 'we made a mistake' (active).
...
Yes, I agree that we often overuse passive voice, and active voice is a good default. However, I think that the rule of thumb should be "write in the natural order", rather than "don't use passive voice unless strictly necessary".
The overwhelming reason why bureaucrats (either those in government or in corporate middle management) love the passive voice is "to avoid taking the blame" (or to avoid appearing to blame someone powerful).
None of this can really be pinned on the use of passive voice. Attention is naturally drawn by the beginning of a sentence and to the end of it, and while the passive is a powerful tool for reordering sentences, its function is equally well served by verbs with the opposite alignment. There is nothing about "there were mistakes" or "mistakes happened" that attributes more agency to anyone than "mistakes were made", but only the last one is passive.
Rather, there is a rich history in English prescriptivism of misdiagnosing and blaming the passive for all ills.
I think none of those is the best way to write this. Start with the conditional first, so the reader knows a branch is coming. Then have the most common case immediately following. Invert the conditional if that's necessary to put the common case first. Restating the opposite of the conditional can make it even clearer.
"If you are age 59 or under, fill form 331. If you are 60 or over, fill form 445."
The last one is only good if you actually read it. I might end up seeing the first clause, assuming the entire line is irrelevant, and moving on without seeing the "Otherwise".
Prefer declarative statements:
"If you are 60 or older, you must fill form 445.
If you are 59 or younger, you must fill form 331."
Starting a paragraph with However doesn't seem right. It ties the paragraph too intimately to the previous one, from which it should stand apart. Similarly, sometimes it may be ok to begin a sentence with But, but in this instance it doesn't read quite right. I'd have preferred:
> At first you may still find yourself writing the odd long sentence, especially when trying to explain a complicated point. Fortunately, most long sentences can be broken up in some way.
Something the article does but doesn't mention, is to use short paragraphs. I do this instinctively on Hacker News/Stack Overflow/email, I think it improves readability, although it might not be appropriate for more formal writing (papers, books).
> Starting a paragraph with However doesn't seem right.
If I were to do this, my paragraphs would become at least 3 times as long. Because much of my writing is complex enough that it takes about half a page to make the 'basic argument' and another half a page to explain the exceptions to the basic argument. I would put both half-pages in separate paragraphs. And I do think it makes sense to start the second paragraph with however. It clearly signals to the reader that:
* The previous point is finished (end of previous paragraph)
* Reading this paragraph without having read the previous one doesn't make sense.
I don't think my second point there is bad. The second paragraph deserves to be split from the first to delineate the arguments. It allows the reader time to drop all but the conclusion of the previous paragraph from their mind. But the second paragraph still depends heavily on the first.
> If I were to do this, my paragraphs would become at least 3 times as long. Because much of my writing
I find this jarring to read. That should be a comma, not a period. By using a period, you've technically made your sentence shorter, but the structure is unchanged. Alternatively you could just chop the Because, and it would flow fine. I really doubt your writing is thrice the density of mine. I very rarely encounter writing that approaches sentences this way, authors are able to get by fine without it.
I find it similarly jarring to read the sentences beginning with and, or but. It's as if you've told me the sentence is finished, only to then reopen it. It's like a programming language permitting a && b; && c;
There may be situations where it's ok to do this, but I wouldn't overuse it.
> Alternatively you could just chop the Because, and it would flow fine.
Hmmm, I guess I agree. I am going to try that a lot. In sentence structure I often get the issue of "$Claim, because $justification." This leads to really long sentences that I feel should be split. And again, I want to preserve the link between the two parts. Doing $Claim. $Justification. Feels like I am making an unsubstantiated claim followed by another unrelated claim.
In the programming language I would see this sort of as:
int a = foo(b);
int foo(b){
return 1 + b
}
(Ignoring a forward declaration of foo in some header).
I guess this is similar to my earlier point. Where I want to split the un-related parts but still want to capture the strong relation between the two.
An alternative might be something like.
"We know that $justification. Hence, it follows that $claim."
Can I say that this is an excellent piece of writing, the tension at the end of the second last paragraph was only finally relieved by the final sentence.
Saying the reason is “accessibility” suggests that it only helps people with poor literacy. There are two things to note:
1. Most people writing content will assume that their readers are like themselves or their social circle and will therefore have good literacy skills. However the actual proportion of people with poor (or even just not high) literacy skills is much higher than you might estimate from your social circle.
2. Improving clarity for people with poor literacy will also improve readability for people with good literacy.
You must also consider people who are not native speakers. I'm sometimes appalled by the complexity of the letters I get in Germany, especially when they are related to immigration.
It's not about dumbing things down, since you convey the same information and solve the same problems, just more efficiently. It's about being understood by the users you are meant to serve.
> So, the solution is to dumb everything down to the least common denominator?
Essentially, yes.
Using words most people are familiar with will afford a lot of people nearly instantaneous cognition [0] of the information you are trying to convey with your writing.
This applies to both ends of the reading spectrum: highly educated people who do a lot of reading than most; and poorly educated people who probably had to drop out of school to make ends meet.
> Government experts often say that because they’re writing technical or complex content for a specialist audience, they do not need to use plain English. This is wrong.
> Research shows that higher literacy people prefer plain English because it allows them to understand the information as quickly as possible.
> For example, research into use of specialist legal language in legal documents found:
> 80% of people preferred sentences written in clear English - and the more complex the issue, the greater that preference (for example, 97% preferred ‘among other things’ over the Latin ‘inter alia’)
> the more educated the person and the more specialist their knowledge, the greater their preference for plain English
> People understand complex specialist language, but do not want to read it if there’s an alternative. This is because people with the highest literacy levels and the greatest expertise tend to have the most to read. They do not have time to pore through reams of dry, complicated prose.
> This makes total sense to me. Simple language makes room for complex ideas.
My takeaway is slightly different: simple words (familiar) are easier to digest than big words (unfamiliar) because familiar words will be parsed very quickly for most people than unfamiliar words.
I prefer to use the categorization of “familiar” vs “unfamiliar” because the categorization of a word as “big” or “simple” depends largely on the reading ability of the person making the assessment.
> People tell us they see it as: ‘dumbing down’, ‘simplistic’
This can be a real issue, indeed.
It is one thing to speak to people in a language they will understand without judging. But it is another thing to simplify grammar and vocabulary too much in written technical documents that need to be precise.
One example is the push to use "plain English" in legal documents. As it happens, legal documents are highly technical and the wording is very important, with terms having an actual precise meaning.
The campaign founder's biography[1] sounds interesting:
Born in 1938, Chrissie largely missed out on formal education
and could not read until she was in her mid‑teens.
And later:
In 1994 Chrissie received an OBE and in 1995 she was awarded an
honorary MA by Manchester University. Two years later, she received
an honorary doctorate from the Open University. And in 1999 she
officially joined the 'establishment' when she was listed in Who's Who.
Plain English has been a 'super power' for my report writing ever since it was drummed into me by a former CEO and MD at a finance and economic consultancy I worked at after University.
"Style toward Clarity and Grace" by Joseph M. Williams is, imho, the most thorough, yet comprehensible, guide to how to write in Plain English. It goes beyond short 'do this, don't do that' guides by explaining why, and how, English can be unclear with exercises to help transform your writing.
I can't stress enough that the ability to take both simple ideas, and complex ideas, and write both in a clear and compelling way that inspires action, will pay dividends over any career.
Don't follow the 'active verbs' rule too much. There's a limit to it, especially when writing technical documents. If it sounds unnatural, or when you have an implied subject that's an important part of the thing you're trying to convey, just use passive voice.
TFA does mention some good uses of passive voice. If I were to add one more example it would be where the object is actually more important than the subject. "The handle then gets closed by one of the cleanup mechanisms" is probably okay if you are telling the story of the handle.
Personally, I'm happy with few tools that helps me write simpler (and hopefully better) English in my everyday usage.
## Long-Form
When I'm writing a long-form prose/essay, I start writing in Hemingway[1]. Edits and changes are done there to cater to my target audience. I'd then pick up the draft from there and go through Grammarly[2] as the final passage.
## Quick, Short Writings
For everyday use, I use iA / Writer[3]. I turn on all the Style Check filters to spot superfluous adjectives, weak verbs, and unwanted repetitions. I then, let it go through Grammarly (either with the App, or via browser Input fields).
This has helped me a lot. Growing up in a region with too many dialects per area, we used English as the one medium to communicate and educate, so I have the affinity to write more phrase-y, English-y. For quite a while, I have wanted to simply and write more clearer, simpler, and effective. These three tools have helped me a lot.
I have used Grammarly for almost a year, it says my vocabulary uses more unique words than
94% of Grammarly users. I'm not particularly proud of that. I want to simplify.
Reading it properly again for the first time in literally around 30 years I'm astonished at how much I've taken its messages to heart in my 20+ year career.
To this day I have a downright visceral reaction against "pretentious diction", and as a fairly confident written communicator I find overly "clever" writing is to be mistrusted, not praised. There's a real Emperor's New Clothes thing going on with a lot of business writing.
Even though I don't particularly like Orwell's writing, I read the essay and it's good but parts haven't aged well.
For example, in the pretentious diction section he lists words like expedite, predict, extraneous, and clandestine as unnecessary words used by bad writers. I wonder if he were still around today, would he stand by that list?
Love it. Check out “Writing for GOV.UK”[0] for more guidance.
Among interesting things to note that they strongly discourage FAQs (“if you write content by starting with user needs, you will not need to use FAQs … they are usually not frequently asked questions by the public, but important information dumped by the content editor”). The concept of FAQ has long been a pet peeve of mine, although I do believe the “question and answer” format has some merit.
> They represent discovered problems in the text the author didn't foresee.
Indeed. If certain questions are asked frequently, likely the information is not presented with audience’s actual needs in mind. Content should be updated, possibly rewritten. Putting up a FAQ shows content editor washing their hands of that responsibility.
I also find it a little rude, like “Welcome to the group of people who, despite our best efforts, didn’t manage to understand what we wrote! Here are some questions you lot keep asking…” (Of course, usually it’s not that, but rather a half-hearted attempt to be helpful and/or reduce the amount of people getting in touch with questions.)
Of course, FAQs originated in places like mailing lists and usenet groups, where it's arguably a good fit, precisely because there is no real standing body of text.
The trouble is that it then got shoe-horned into being used on websites.
I think FAQs are an excellent way to present information— even information that has been previously covered— in a different way. Not everybody absorbs the same way, and not all information is presented clearly.
Beautiful. The worst is that many of these ugly words come en masse to the lips of marketing droids speaking in other languages. They can't help but pepper their stupid speeches with bad English. God how I hate that.
Since everyone knows this is corporate bullshit speak, I wonder if the actual function of these words is to signal that you're so high status that you can get away with not saying anything of substance. That you don't need to get your hands dirty with the real world, you can just float around in this vague space and still command a huge salary. Then you must be a powerful person who actually gets ahead through the shady under the table style of work. So if I see a successful person talking in this way, I can assume I can approach them with my nefarious plans and he'll be able to lie and deflect suspicion and successfully go through with corruption.
someone could write a simple grammar checker that looks for words in that list, passive voices, sentence length and whatnot and suggests alternatives. It wouldn't work without human oversight but then again, no automated checker really does.
Although, as ever on these topics, it's probably worth finding out what professionals think of these tools (spoiler: not much although this is from 2014 and it's possible they've improved it since.)
I use https://languagetool.org/ for that. I have integrated this Java program in Vim as well. Every time I think I finished a piece of write, I run the ":LanguageToolCheck" command to learn that my writing still leaves a lot to be desired.
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 exasperate community complaints at that time.
Rust's developers are mostly very left-wing and are, in my view, over-eager to imprint their views on societal power imbalance on their technical project, the Rust language. They hint not too subtly that before them systems programming was the preserve of forthright white guys and that they're breaking that hegemony.
It’s one of those words that used to have a different meaning but then a bunch of people started using it “wrong”, which is annoying to some people. It used to connote a legal or other official authority to do something.
Kinda like how some people don’t like hearing that their plane will be taking off “momentarily” or when people use “begs the question” to mean “raises the question”
It has become a buzzword. Sprinkle it in your text (along with "experiences", "embrace", "diverse", "engagement" etc.) and your text will be hard to argue against. Words are weapons. Just like you have to sprinkle "democracy" and "peace" in statements when you start wars as a country.
I just fell in love with this list.
I'm considering handing it to the very expensive consultants who make shiny presentations but tend to be very vague about how concepts get transformed into tangible things.
I had the same reaction. That section was painful. On the other hand, sometimes people get away with it, so the advice is right in one sense, even if it's wrong in another.
Longer sentences are better and more efficient for conveying content when used appropriately. Short sentences mean you have to use too many conjunctions and other filler. Use whatever style you think will be the most effective for readers.
One just keeps adding detail. It's essentially a list. Breaking it up into multiple sentences would require a lot of unnecessary conjunctions as you say.
The other kind of long sentence forces you to keep a lot in your head until the meaning is finally resolved at the very end. That's the kind of sentence that should be broken up because it creates unnecessary mental burden.
> Most of the UK's biggest insurance companies produce policies that explain everything fully in plain English.
Is this an argument in favour of plain English? Insurance policy documents are incredibly hard to understand and full of bloat. They are a near-perfect example of how not to write an accessible, informative, and useful document for the intended audience.
> Sadly, thanks to the bureaucrats of public service industries, local councils, banks, building societies, _insurance companies_ and government departments, we have learnt to accept an official style of writing that is inefficient and often unfriendly.
> But in the last few years, many of these offenders have started to put things right, either rewriting their documents clearly or training their staff in the art of plain English, or both.
So, it’s a work in progress. I agree that the order is confusing though.
I saw that but couldn't square it with the earlier sentence.
In my previous role we interviewed tens of small business owners and nobody knew what was in their docs. I hope insurance companies will be as bold to go beyond simplifying language but also simplifying terms (e.g. Lemonade's https://www.lemonade.com/policy-two)
In the UK, the Plain English Campaign awards certifications to numerous insurance companies, among other businesses and organisations, for writing their policies in Plain English.
The point they are making is that plain English belongs is present in domains as hefty and complex as insurance.
▶ Your readers are here for information, not entertainment. Get to the point.
▶ If a paragraph answers a question, the first sentence should be the tl;dr. Highlight it if necessary. [1]
▶ Use formatting to make skimming easier. Users don't read documents from start to finish. They are looking for specific answers. [2] I spent a lot of time tweaking my website to be more readable.
▶ Use can (optional), should (recommended) and must (mandatory) consistently. "It's ill-advised to do this, because ..." >>> "You should not do this, because ...".
▶ Avoid run-on sentences. Generally, that means maximum one comma per sentence.
▶ Start with the "if" part of the sentence: "If you are over 60, you are not eligible". It lets people skip sentences that don't concern them.
▶ Avoid expressions and idioms as much as possible. "If you're feeling under the weather, stay home" >>> "If you don't feel well, stay home".
▶ Avoid ambiguity between sentences: "The cat sits in the house. It is old." >>> "The old cat sits in the house".
▶ Use commas generously. It makes sentences easier to digest. I'm a big fan of the Oxford comma.
▶ Use Hemingway [3] to catch some of those mistakes
---
In other words, DON'T BE CLEVER. It feels a lot like writing software that will be maintained by novice programmers.
Simple language is really important, especially if you deal with the general population. Some people don't read well. Some people don't speak English well. Some topics are confusing enough on their own.
I'm curious. Is there a specific reason why the trend for our use of the English language went towards this direction, when in the past, a lot of the historical material I read seemed intentionally verbose?
Sure, it's all for ensuring we are understood better among ourselves, but I wonder if writing this way makes us cognitively simpler.
Maybe in the past, written material was consumed by the elite, educated fraction of the population, and this was a way to "show off" their knowledge. Today, reading is accessible to a much broader percentage of people who may not all be as educated.
> written material was consumed by the elite, educated fraction of the population, and this was a way to "show off" their knowledge
One notes that even in letters sent home from American and Western European wars in the 19th century, the common soldiers who wrote those letters often used much more elaborate sentence structures than today, even though they were from the peasantry and had not received more than a rudimentary schooling.
Because the practice of parsing more complicated sentences, compounded over time, might instill in people the mental fortitude that translates in other areas? But yup, I get it.
Plain English should not be confused with low literacy level. Plain English is a style that is hard to master. Only 12% of U.S. adults reach the highest PIAAC literacy proficiency levels.
"unnecessary verbosity" is just one way to express your position in the society. Wearing impractical clothes, complex etiquette, having pale skin and speaking in certain manner was something that requires either wealth or practise.
Today business jargon combined with clothes and behaviour still work today as signalling your identity. So is wearing hoodie and saying "bro" constantly. People learn to feel comfortable in the uniform and in the language they identify with.
It is also possible that certain styles of writing and clothing are felt by some to be more beautiful. It is not necessary to reduce every stylistic predilection to status or identity signalling.
It is not so much about verbosity as it is about clarity in public communication. It is not about preventing a poetic turn of phrase but about avoiding the all too common business bullshit intended to deflect blame and shift responsibility by muddling the content to near incomprehensibility.
> "Consider the leisurely style of British correspondent William Howard Russell in his coverage of the Battle of Balaklava in 1854.
If the exhibition
of the most brilliant valor,
of the excess of courage, and
of a daring
which would have reflected luster
on the best days of chivalry
can afford full consolation
for the disaster of today,
we can have no reason
to regret the melancholy loss
which we sustained
in a contest
with a savage and barbarian enemy.
> Not until the end of the story does Russell get to the news: Because of a mix-up in orders a 650-man cavalry brigade charged head-on into enemy guns. In a few minutes more than 100 were dead. But Russell had no reason to write an urgent story because it would take nearly three weeks for his dispatch to reach his readers by boat and train and spread news of “The Charge of the Light Brigade."
It's not that the style was unknown (Tacitus' prose was flattened compared with Cicero's) but that it wasn't expected in asynchronous long-form writing. In a different genre, compare Cooke's easily tweetable summary of Custer's 1876 command:
> "Benteen. Come On. Big Village. Be Quick. Bring Packs. P.S. Bring Packs."
This is especially true for late 1700s English, specifically around the time of America's founding. The entirety of the Federalist Papers could be reduced to a fraction of their original lengths with plain English without losing any of context.
> Sadly, thanks to the bureaucrats of public service industries, local councils, banks, building societies, insurance companies and government departments, we have learnt to accept an official style of writing that is inefficient and often unfriendly.
Interesting. I thought the use of "thanks to" as a preposition indicating a causal relationship with negative consequences was generally discouraged, because, by its very nature, it's a metaphor. But I can't find any style guide that would support this.
The EU has ended up inventing its own form of English [0]
"Over the years, the European institutions have developed a vocabulary that differs from that of any recognised form of English. It includes words that do not exist or are relatively unknown to native English speakers outside the EU institutions and often even to standard spellcheckers/grammar checkers (‘planification’, ‘to precise’ or ‘telematics’ for example) and words that are used with a meaning, often derived from other languages, that is not usually found in English dictionaries (‘coherent’ being a case in point). Some words are used with more or less the correct meaning, but in contexts where they would not be used by native speakers (‘homogenise’, for example)."
This is especially important when working at an international company with many non-native English speakers.
One of the software engineers (an English major) I worked with at a previous gig could not get his head around the idea of writing in plan English.
He would write English at such an elaborate level that when he announced his resignation to the company via email, most people did not understand from that email that he was resigning!
I'm confused here. I thought what I thought of as "ping me" was obvious, but since you didn't state what I'm thinking of I guess not. Are we talking about slack/discord/teams pings here? If so the use is the onomatopoeia.
A possible alternative to "learning" is "lesson". The problem with "lesson" is that it can have two meanings:
(a) a formal lecture given by a qualified person to a class;
(b) a fact that you learned from any person or even just a situation you were in.
"Lesson" in the sense (b) is a direct substitute for "a learning", but I have to admit a few people might sometimes interpret it as (a) and be confused. But it depends on the context - if a project report has a "lessons learnt" heading I don't think any reader is going to expect that means meaning (a).
Yeah - 'lessons learned' is idiomatically more tantamount to something 'learned after having made an error'.
I'll bet there are words in other languages that more perfectly capture the meaning of 'learnings' - and admittedly it's a really ugly colloquialism ... but I would accept it out of a resigned pragmatism.
I think the word 'learnings' comes to software companies from India. A company I worked at didn't use the word until an Indian senior manager came on, and then everyone started talking about 'learnings.' Conversely, I have heard it used in conversational English between people from India.
There are plenty of other English words that work in context where you might use 'learning', like 'lesson', 'insight', or 'takeaway'. 'Learning' just encapsulates them all without nuance.
I thought that "pre-booking" means that you input all the available data related to a document into some computer system, but you do not finalize & accept the document yet -> so some of the data can still be changed in the future without consequence (for example: when some issue is explained with a supplier).
Pre-booking is the initial step before a complete booking.
That's not entirely unreasonable, pre in this case trying to make explicit "ask me about this well ahead of time".
eg you can make on the day bookings or call up HR to say you've got dave from forklifts incorporated on the phone and you need the company card immediately.
Dunno, Ping me felt quite natural to me. It feels like a handy substitute for when there are multiple options for one person to contact another and person one does not care how he is contacted. As opposed to very formal communications that stick to email or mail.
Ping me => email/call/slack/whatsapp/zulip/telegram/meet-in-person me
I personally love "ping me". It's even shorter and more punchy, compared to "message me".
Language evolves. Shakespeare would find our English today bewildering. Instead of complaining about it, I find it most helpful to keep up with the latest lingo, and focus instead on conveying my message most clearly.
I don't mind 'ping me': that one has a clear reference to submarines and networks.
What bothers me are 'ask' and 'lift' used as nouns. They add nothing to the language, and are just ugly. Maybe my father felt the same the first time he heard 'sweet' to mean 'cool.'
> "We should socialize the learnings from this discussion."
I feel like we worked for the same company. Last time I heard this exact phrase I was participating in a meeting where one of the agenda points was feedback from a meeting about meetings.
I've heard complaints that while it calls itself "campaign", implying it's a not-for-profit grass roots movement, it is actually a private for-profit company selling publications along with commercial editing and training services.
I think this is English specific and could do more harm than good for someone with a different background. E.g. in my language counting anything > 1000 in hundreds would sound very weird.
"Ten hundred", "twenty hundred", etc. sound very weird in English, too, despite "eleven hundred", "twelve hundred", etc. being commonplace in at least the American dialect.
That said, "ten hundred"
is hardly the weirdest thing about English prose written in ten-hundred-mode...
327 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 249 ms ] threadThis can also make for rather dull writing and I appreciate the irony in this paragraph:
> However, at first you may still find yourself writing the odd long sentence, especially when trying to explain a complicated point. But most long sentences can be broken up in some way.
Here we see the Tetris player drop a sequence of blocks leaving a 3x1 gap down the left edge. Where are they going with this? More blocks stack up on the middle and right, there are “bubbles” in the pile that are covered by squares and there’s still that annoying gap on the left holding them back from clearing. Time passes. The screen is now getting dangerously full.
Then they drop in a pair of 4x1 blocks that completes rows 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6. The bubbles on rows 4 and 7 become exposed making a T shaped hole. The next block to fall is a T shape. The screen clears, the sentence’s cognitive buffer is flushed, and we move on to the next point.
Somehow, this single expression made me finally (after reading beginning of it) understand your post better. Before that expression had hit my apprehension, the post read like "what is he on about?".
Perhaps needless to point out, but this is quite a beautiful thing you've done there: the expression itself works as the very thing it describes, in the context of your post. Within the post, that expression is the T-shaped block, - the thing that clears the buffer and makes all the collected blocks all make sense together.
"You must fill form 331 unless you are over 60 years old, in which case you must fill form 445."
"You must fill form 331. If you are over 60 years old, you must fill 445 instead."
"If you are over 60 years old, you must fill form 445. Otherwise, you must fill form 331."
You might have noticed that the last version is an if-else statement.
“Complete form 445 if you are over 60 years old. Complete form 331 if you are 60 years old or younger.”
In other words, it's not really an if-else block, but just an if statement before the default scenario. Almost everyone has to fill form 331.
I think the sentence structure you suggest would quickly make a longer text tedious to read. I have experimented with that sentence format, and it added a lot of text, but not a lot of clarity.
I also think that putting the if statement at the end makes little sense, just like when reading code.
Also, is it my age at the time I sign the form, or my age at the time the form is received, that matters? Arguably that's a problem with the rule itself rather than how it's expressed. It's better if you can write something like: "If you were born before 6 April 1960 ... otherwise ...". Note that "after 6 Apr 1960" is arguably more ambiguous than "before 6 Apr 1960" because there's a slight risk that someone could interpret "6 Apr 1960" as meaning 1960-04-06 00:00:00.
This problem is vaguely related to the insurance policy renewals that leave a one-minute gap between the old policy and the new policy, and even more vaguely related to the ambiguity of "midnight on the next day".
Imprecise language to allow flexibility and 'let the judges decide'... I'm not sure I'm comfortable with common-law-inspired regulation.
Not sure how to do this better though.
I strongly prefer pairing “before” and “on or after” (or “on or before” with “after”) when it comes to dates. “On <date>” is widely and conventionally understood to encompass the entire day, and it seems to make it far less likely than with after/before alone with “otherwise” that people will trip up over boundary conditions. But the right phrasing is highly sensitive to the context and the underlying rule; if it's an age based rule and you have fixed text that doesn't dynamically adjust by dates you can't use date-based language even if it would be clearer.
This resplendent sentence in the Vulkan spec did it to me the other day:
The layout of subresources of images on other logical devices that are bound to VkDeviceMemory objects associated with the same underlying memory resources as external memory objects on the lost device becomes VK_IMAGE_LAYOUT_UNDEFINED.
I got about half way through and suddenly discovered I didn't know where I was, what year it was or my name.
A meeting of faculty heads is taking place. The topic - funding. The chairman says: "Hey, physicists, why are you so expensive? You need all those gadgets and materials to perform your experiments. Look at the mathematicians. All they need to produce a research paper are a box of paper, a box of pencils, and a trash can." "We don't even need trash cans, sir." announces the dean of Philosophy.
(becomes (qualified (layout of subresources of images on other logical devices) (bound . (same-memory-resources (VkDeviceMemory objects) (external memory objects on the lost device)))) VK_IMAGE_LAYOUT_UNDEFINED)
Will natural-language tools eventually help us turn these puddles of nouns into reasonable sentences?
(I don't know anything about Vulkan, and there is some ambiguity in the quoted sentence, so I've given a few different versions with different meanings. Note that the ambiguity is not necessarily a flaw in the quoted sentence -- it may be perfectly unambiguous, albeit very unclear, to anyone with any knowledge of Vulkan.)
If a device is lost, the subresources of some images on other logical devices may have their layout become VK_IMAGE_LAYOUT_UNDEFINED. This happens if the VkDeviceMemory object to which the image is bound is associated with the same underlying memory resources as an external memory object on the lost device.
... or, if an image isn't necessarily bound to exactly one VkDeviceMemory object, ...
If a device is lost, the subresources of some images on other logical devices may have their layouts become VK_IMAGE_LAYOUT_UNDEFINED. This happens if the image is bound to a VkDeviceMemory object which is associated with the same underlying memory resources as an external memory object on the lost device.
... or, if it's the other logical device bound to a VkDeviceMemory object rather than the image:
If a device is lost, the subresources of images on other logical devices may have their layouts become VK_IMAGE_LAYOUT_UNDEFINED. This happens if the other device is bound to a VkDeviceMemory object which is associated with the same underlying memory resources as an external memory object on the lost device.
Or maybe a slightly different structure. "If a device is lost, and some VkDeviceMemory object is associated with hte same underlying memory resources as an external memory object on that lost device, then all subresources of any image bound to that VkDeviceMemory object have their layout set to VK_IMAGE_LAYOUT_UNDEFINED."
But I can't help thinking that this really wants a diagram. Nodes for the logical devices, the images, the VkDeviceMemory object, the "underlying memory resources", the external memory object. Labelled arrows for relationships like "bound to", "has as underlying memory resource", "is a subresource of", etc.
And it seems as if this business of "having your layout set to VK_IMAGE_LAYOUT_UNDEFINED" deserves a name. (Naming things is a powerful general technique for reducing cognitive stack overflows.)
"Under some circumstances, the memory resources associated with an image may be invalidated, in which case all subresources of the image will have layout VK_IMAGE_LAYOUT_INVALIDATED and [explain here the consequences of that]. In this case, the image is said to be layout-invalidated. " ... And then later, when talking about lost devices, you say "If a device is lost, images on other logical devices may be layout-invalidated. This happens when the image is bound to a VkDeviceMemory object, and that object is associated with the same underlying memory resources as an external memory object on the lost device."
This problem is further exacerbated by the wide variety of temporal arithmetic possibilities any such workflow might adopt.
The solution is to either combine the forms, or (in an interactive context) ask the user if they were born before 1960, then give them the right form.
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 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.
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 details regarding the subject (adjectives and others)
4. the verb, with correct grammatical form depending on the subject
Something I find quite frustrating is that I have to keep in mind everything about the subject during the entire duration of the sentence just to be able to use the verb correctly. So because of this I always try to keep the distance between a subject and the verb as short as possible when trying to speak German, which results in very terse sentences that looks similar to what you described.
My life partner speaks native German and doesn't even realize that she does this buffering.
I knew a German to Polish translator and she complained about how hard live translation was when a key part of the sentence is held until the very end.
In Dutch at least, you can imagine these really long sentences which build up details, adding more and more, until they finally surprise you with the verb at the end. But in practice people don't speak that way - the patterns of speech and just the way people use the language in different subtle ways mostly prevents that from happening, in natural ways that don't feel terse. It may be different in academia/legal professions and that sort of thing.
Example time!
Dutch: "De man die de vrouw die bloemen plukt kust." Literally: "The man who (the woman (who flowers picks)) kisses" Meaning: "The man who kisses the woman that is picking flowers"
The subordinate clause is sandwiched between subject and verb. However, Dutch allows the following order:
Dutch: "De man die de vrouw kust die bloemen plukt." Literally: "The man who (the woman) kisses (who flowers picks)"
In this case the verb kisses has moved to the front. It is a transformation that allows a form of tail recursion elimination. After the main verb the parse stack for the main clause can be popped and all resources dedicated to parsing the trailing subordinate clause(s). This allows us to string together quite a lot of subclauses without getting lost.
Correct, a sentence like this is quite easy to read:
De man, die gewoonlijk zijn handen afveegt aan zijn broek, besloot dit keer zijn handen af te vegen aan de handdoek die zijn vrouw, die gister nog bloemen aan het plukken was, specifiek hiervoor had neergelegd.
E. g. "aufgeben" translated part-by-part is "upgive", so "to surrender" or "to give up" in English.
However, in sth. like 3rd position singular, the form would be "er gibt auf" ("he gives up"). But in German, the object goes between "gives" and "up".
Thus, my roommate mentioned a sentence like "Der Präsident gibt sein Versprechen zur Verbesserung der Arbeitslosigkeitsquote auf" (The President gives up his promise about improving unemploymemt rates).
So yeah, parsing German sometimes results a pause while everyone unwinds their stack.
As you mention, it gets even screwier given the opportunity to put a "nicht" (not) at the very end of a sentence to lead listeners down a garden path.
In German, the word order "I believe you not" is the proper way to phrase that sentiment, without being pithy about it.
The "in" is logically related to "which basket", so one would expect that the question would actually be *"In which basket...", but nope, that's rustic and colloquial at best. I suspect it's because of the word inversion in questions, since in dependent clauses the order is reasonable: "I put the figurine in this woven concrete basket over there".
Could the tension/buffering in that sentence be resolved with something like: "Which basket has got that exquisite marble figurine"? When spoken by a native speaker 'has got' would likely be contracted to "which basket's got"
Sub out 'has got' for 'contains' if you want to be more formal.
nope, the other way around; "don't end sentences in prepositions" is a formal rule iirc. Quoting Grammarly website,
* Which journal was your article published in? (Casual)
* In which journal was your article published? (Formal)
"Into which basket did you put that exquisite marble figurine?"
This is no different in English: "He told the upstanding, proper young woman off".
"He told off the ... woman."
German doesn't (directly) give you that chance.
[0] https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/77472/is-there-a...
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 :)
An American woman visiting Berlin - intent on hearing Bismarck speak - obtained two tickets for the Reichstag visitors' gallery and enlisted an interpreter to accompany her.
Soon after their arrival, Bismarck rose and began to speak. The interpreter, however, simply sat listening with intense concentration. The woman, anxious for him to begin translating, nudged and budged him, to no avail.
Finally, unable to control herself any longer, the woman burst out: "What is he saying!?" "Patience, madam," the interpreter replied. "I am waiting for the verb."
"As Gregor Samsa one morning from restless dreams awoke, found he himself in his bed into a huge verminous bug transformed."
https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html
"The proverbial German phenomenon of the 'verb-at-the-end', about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nunplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic pushing and popping."
1. It's an infinitive verb, perfect verb, or a verb in a subclause, in which case it goes to the end.
2. You're asking a question without a question word (i.e. "Can you" or "Will you") or issuing a command, in which case the verb moves to the beginning).
Examples:
Verb in second position:
> "Was willst du" -> What do you want?
Infinitive verb at the end of the clause:
> "Ich will mit dir reden" -> I want to talk to you
Conjugated verb at the end of a subclause:
> "Kannst du mir versprechen, dass du mich nie verlassen -wirst?" -> Can you promise you will never leave me
Just to clarify, I'm not any sort of authority on this. Merely trying to double check my own understanding as I continue on my language learning journey :)
In light of that, the default German construction is effectively verb-last. (separable prefixes moving to the end exacerbates this need for buffering too)
Üben macht den Meister!
FWIW in UK 'must' in gov advice indicates a legal obligation. It annoys me no end when such obligations are not supported by references to legislation: as then I can't check if they've been correctly interpreted.
Prose should be readable, but also functional.
I did start adding little calculators and utilities in my articles, but those only make sense because I have a lot of free time.
I heavily cite sources, so at least you'd know the exact paragraph in the law that supports it. It's something my competitors neglect, and it makes it hard to tell facts apart from hearsay.
It's poor writing to state a mistruth and then whittle away at it until you arrive at the truth. Far better to build up truth upon truth until you arrive at the full picture.
Bad:
A natural number greater than 1 cannot be expressed as the product of two smaller natural numbers, if it is prime.
Good:
A prime number is a natural number greater than 1 that is not a product of two smaller natural numbers. (Stolen from Wikipedia.)
A prime number is a natural number that is greater than 1, and not a product of two smaller numbers.
Commas let you catch your breath and flush the buffer. When there are two many commas, I use a bullet list.
I'm afraid I don't see your rephrasing as an improvement. It doesn't substantially restructure the sentence, and to someone familiar with the mathematical writing style, it reads less naturally.
To me (I am not a native speaker), the default emphasis is on the first words:
The police stopped the riot. -> emphasis on the police
The riot was stopped by the police. -> emphasis on the riot
It coincides with the examples in which passive voice is recommended.
> To make something less hostile - 'this bill has not been paid' (passive) is softer than 'you have not paid this bill' (active).
> To avoid taking the blame - 'a mistake was made' (passive) rather than 'we made a mistake' (active).
...
Yes, I agree that we often overuse passive voice, and active voice is a good default. However, I think that the rule of thumb should be "write in the natural order", rather than "don't use passive voice unless strictly necessary".
Rather, there is a rich history in English prescriptivism of misdiagnosing and blaming the passive for all ills.
http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.pdf
"If you are age 59 or under, fill form 331. If you are 60 or over, fill form 445."
Prefer declarative statements:
"If you are 60 or older, you must fill form 445.
If you are 59 or younger, you must fill form 331."
Starting a paragraph with However doesn't seem right. It ties the paragraph too intimately to the previous one, from which it should stand apart. Similarly, sometimes it may be ok to begin a sentence with But, but in this instance it doesn't read quite right. I'd have preferred:
> At first you may still find yourself writing the odd long sentence, especially when trying to explain a complicated point. Fortunately, most long sentences can be broken up in some way.
Something the article does but doesn't mention, is to use short paragraphs. I do this instinctively on Hacker News/Stack Overflow/email, I think it improves readability, although it might not be appropriate for more formal writing (papers, books).
> Starting a paragraph with However doesn't seem right.
If I were to do this, my paragraphs would become at least 3 times as long. Because much of my writing is complex enough that it takes about half a page to make the 'basic argument' and another half a page to explain the exceptions to the basic argument. I would put both half-pages in separate paragraphs. And I do think it makes sense to start the second paragraph with however. It clearly signals to the reader that:
* The previous point is finished (end of previous paragraph)
* Reading this paragraph without having read the previous one doesn't make sense.
I don't think my second point there is bad. The second paragraph deserves to be split from the first to delineate the arguments. It allows the reader time to drop all but the conclusion of the previous paragraph from their mind. But the second paragraph still depends heavily on the first.
I find this jarring to read. That should be a comma, not a period. By using a period, you've technically made your sentence shorter, but the structure is unchanged. Alternatively you could just chop the Because, and it would flow fine. I really doubt your writing is thrice the density of mine. I very rarely encounter writing that approaches sentences this way, authors are able to get by fine without it.
I find it similarly jarring to read the sentences beginning with and, or but. It's as if you've told me the sentence is finished, only to then reopen it. It's like a programming language permitting a && b; && c;
There may be situations where it's ok to do this, but I wouldn't overuse it.
Hmmm, I guess I agree. I am going to try that a lot. In sentence structure I often get the issue of "$Claim, because $justification." This leads to really long sentences that I feel should be split. And again, I want to preserve the link between the two parts. Doing $Claim. $Justification. Feels like I am making an unsubstantiated claim followed by another unrelated claim.
In the programming language I would see this sort of as:
(Ignoring a forward declaration of foo in some header).I guess this is similar to my earlier point. Where I want to split the un-related parts but still want to capture the strong relation between the two.
An alternative might be something like.
"We know that $justification. Hence, it follows that $claim."
You've given me food for thought. Thanks!
Kudos!
1. Most people writing content will assume that their readers are like themselves or their social circle and will therefore have good literacy skills. However the actual proportion of people with poor (or even just not high) literacy skills is much higher than you might estimate from your social circle.
2. Improving clarity for people with poor literacy will also improve readability for people with good literacy.
(I'm not sure if I'm agreeing with you here)
Essentially, yes.
Using words most people are familiar with will afford a lot of people nearly instantaneous cognition [0] of the information you are trying to convey with your writing.
This applies to both ends of the reading spectrum: highly educated people who do a lot of reading than most; and poorly educated people who probably had to drop out of school to make ends meet.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subitizing
> Research shows that higher literacy people prefer plain English because it allows them to understand the information as quickly as possible.
> For example, research into use of specialist legal language in legal documents found:
> 80% of people preferred sentences written in clear English - and the more complex the issue, the greater that preference (for example, 97% preferred ‘among other things’ over the Latin ‘inter alia’)
> the more educated the person and the more specialist their knowledge, the greater their preference for plain English
> People understand complex specialist language, but do not want to read it if there’s an alternative. This is because people with the highest literacy levels and the greatest expertise tend to have the most to read. They do not have time to pore through reams of dry, complicated prose.
someone linked this above: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/content-design/writing-for-gov-u...
My takeaway is slightly different: simple words (familiar) are easier to digest than big words (unfamiliar) because familiar words will be parsed very quickly for most people than unfamiliar words.
I prefer to use the categorization of “familiar” vs “unfamiliar” because the categorization of a word as “big” or “simple” depends largely on the reading ability of the person making the assessment.
This can be a real issue, indeed.
It is one thing to speak to people in a language they will understand without judging. But it is another thing to simplify grammar and vocabulary too much in written technical documents that need to be precise.
One example is the push to use "plain English" in legal documents. As it happens, legal documents are highly technical and the wording is very important, with terms having an actual precise meaning.
There needs to be a balance.
"Style toward Clarity and Grace" by Joseph M. Williams is, imho, the most thorough, yet comprehensible, guide to how to write in Plain English. It goes beyond short 'do this, don't do that' guides by explaining why, and how, English can be unclear with exercises to help transform your writing.
I can't stress enough that the ability to take both simple ideas, and complex ideas, and write both in a clear and compelling way that inspires action, will pay dividends over any career.
A run-on sentence can still be read, just more slowly. An unfamiliar word can be tackled with a dictionary.
But if the text isn’t well-organized on the larger scale, there is no hope.
There's a youtube video with Steven Pinker explaining how passive verbs often improve the flow of writing thus increasing legibility
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OV5J6BfToSw
## Long-Form
When I'm writing a long-form prose/essay, I start writing in Hemingway[1]. Edits and changes are done there to cater to my target audience. I'd then pick up the draft from there and go through Grammarly[2] as the final passage.
## Quick, Short Writings
For everyday use, I use iA / Writer[3]. I turn on all the Style Check filters to spot superfluous adjectives, weak verbs, and unwanted repetitions. I then, let it go through Grammarly (either with the App, or via browser Input fields).
This has helped me a lot. Growing up in a region with too many dialects per area, we used English as the one medium to communicate and educate, so I have the affinity to write more phrase-y, English-y. For quite a while, I have wanted to simply and write more clearer, simpler, and effective. These three tools have helped me a lot.
I have used Grammarly for almost a year, it says my vocabulary uses more unique words than 94% of Grammarly users. I'm not particularly proud of that. I want to simplify.
1. http://www.hemingwayapp.com
2. https://grammarly.com
3. https://ia.net/writer
Reading it properly again for the first time in literally around 30 years I'm astonished at how much I've taken its messages to heart in my 20+ year career.
To this day I have a downright visceral reaction against "pretentious diction", and as a fairly confident written communicator I find overly "clever" writing is to be mistrusted, not praised. There's a real Emperor's New Clothes thing going on with a lot of business writing.
For example, in the pretentious diction section he lists words like expedite, predict, extraneous, and clandestine as unnecessary words used by bad writers. I wonder if he were still around today, would he stand by that list?
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/style-guide/a-to-z-of-gov-uk-sty...
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/content-design/writing-for-gov-u...
Among interesting things to note that they strongly discourage FAQs (“if you write content by starting with user needs, you will not need to use FAQs … they are usually not frequently asked questions by the public, but important information dumped by the content editor”). The concept of FAQ has long been a pet peeve of mine, although I do believe the “question and answer” format has some merit.
[0] https://www.gov.uk/guidance/content-design/writing-for-gov-u...
They represent discovered problems in the text the author didn't foresee.
Indeed. If certain questions are asked frequently, likely the information is not presented with audience’s actual needs in mind. Content should be updated, possibly rewritten. Putting up a FAQ shows content editor washing their hands of that responsibility.
I also find it a little rude, like “Welcome to the group of people who, despite our best efforts, didn’t manage to understand what we wrote! Here are some questions you lot keep asking…” (Of course, usually it’s not that, but rather a half-hearted attempt to be helpful and/or reduce the amount of people getting in touch with questions.)
Agenda, advance, deliver, deploy, facilitate, empower - all such cringy words when used out of context.
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10416 "Filed by Mark Liberman under Prescriptivist poppycock"
edit: Just checked and it still rates "Silly" x 75 as "Good". "Hemingway" x 30 rates as "Post-graduate" but otherwise good. Yeah, it's still broken.
Obviously gov.uk material is of a different nature than that of a corporate motto, but it speaks to the exasperate community complaints at that time.
Kinda like how some people don’t like hearing that their plane will be taking off “momentarily” or when people use “begs the question” to mean “raises the question”
Your mileage may vary. By rather a lot.
TBH in the example given the above should simply be:
> A language for building reliable and efficient software.
One just keeps adding detail. It's essentially a list. Breaking it up into multiple sentences would require a lot of unnecessary conjunctions as you say.
The other kind of long sentence forces you to keep a lot in your head until the meaning is finally resolved at the very end. That's the kind of sentence that should be broken up because it creates unnecessary mental burden.
Obligatory XKCD...
+ https://xkcd.com/simplewriter/ + http://www.hemingwayapp.com/
Is this an argument in favour of plain English? Insurance policy documents are incredibly hard to understand and full of bloat. They are a near-perfect example of how not to write an accessible, informative, and useful document for the intended audience.
> Sadly, thanks to the bureaucrats of public service industries, local councils, banks, building societies, _insurance companies_ and government departments, we have learnt to accept an official style of writing that is inefficient and often unfriendly.
> But in the last few years, many of these offenders have started to put things right, either rewriting their documents clearly or training their staff in the art of plain English, or both.
So, it’s a work in progress. I agree that the order is confusing though.
In my previous role we interviewed tens of small business owners and nobody knew what was in their docs. I hope insurance companies will be as bold to go beyond simplifying language but also simplifying terms (e.g. Lemonade's https://www.lemonade.com/policy-two)
The point they are making is that plain English belongs is present in domains as hefty and complex as insurance.
Here's a recent article I wrote. It should give you an idea of what I mean: https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/car-insurance-germany
There are a few things I would add to this:
---
▶ Your readers are here for information, not entertainment. Get to the point.
▶ If a paragraph answers a question, the first sentence should be the tl;dr. Highlight it if necessary. [1]
▶ Use formatting to make skimming easier. Users don't read documents from start to finish. They are looking for specific answers. [2] I spent a lot of time tweaking my website to be more readable.
▶ Use can (optional), should (recommended) and must (mandatory) consistently. "It's ill-advised to do this, because ..." >>> "You should not do this, because ...".
▶ Avoid run-on sentences. Generally, that means maximum one comma per sentence.
▶ Start with the "if" part of the sentence: "If you are over 60, you are not eligible". It lets people skip sentences that don't concern them.
▶ Avoid expressions and idioms as much as possible. "If you're feeling under the weather, stay home" >>> "If you don't feel well, stay home".
▶ Avoid ambiguity between sentences: "The cat sits in the house. It is old." >>> "The old cat sits in the house".
▶ Use commas generously. It makes sentences easier to digest. I'm a big fan of the Oxford comma.
▶ Use Hemingway [3] to catch some of those mistakes
---
In other words, DON'T BE CLEVER. It feels a lot like writing software that will be maintained by novice programmers.
Simple language is really important, especially if you deal with the general population. Some people don't read well. Some people don't speak English well. Some topics are confusing enough on their own.
[1] https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/anmeldung-in-english-berli...
[2] https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/how-to-get-a-german-freela...
[3] http://www.hemingwayapp.com/
Sure, it's all for ensuring we are understood better among ourselves, but I wonder if writing this way makes us cognitively simpler.
One notes that even in letters sent home from American and Western European wars in the 19th century, the common soldiers who wrote those letters often used much more elaborate sentence structures than today, even though they were from the peasantry and had not received more than a rudimentary schooling.
If an idea can be expressed in the same way with "Plain English", how would this make people 'congnitively simpler'?
"unnecessary verbosity" is just one way to express your position in the society. Wearing impractical clothes, complex etiquette, having pale skin and speaking in certain manner was something that requires either wealth or practise.
Today business jargon combined with clothes and behaviour still work today as signalling your identity. So is wearing hoodie and saying "bro" constantly. People learn to feel comfortable in the uniform and in the language they identify with.
> "Consider the leisurely style of British correspondent William Howard Russell in his coverage of the Battle of Balaklava in 1854.
> Not until the end of the story does Russell get to the news: Because of a mix-up in orders a 650-man cavalry brigade charged head-on into enemy guns. In a few minutes more than 100 were dead. But Russell had no reason to write an urgent story because it would take nearly three weeks for his dispatch to reach his readers by boat and train and spread news of “The Charge of the Light Brigade."It's not that the style was unknown (Tacitus' prose was flattened compared with Cicero's) but that it wasn't expected in asynchronous long-form writing. In a different genre, compare Cooke's easily tweetable summary of Custer's 1876 command:
> "Benteen. Come On. Big Village. Be Quick. Bring Packs. P.S. Bring Packs."
Interesting. I thought the use of "thanks to" as a preposition indicating a causal relationship with negative consequences was generally discouraged, because, by its very nature, it's a metaphor. But I can't find any style guide that would support this.
"Over the years, the European institutions have developed a vocabulary that differs from that of any recognised form of English. It includes words that do not exist or are relatively unknown to native English speakers outside the EU institutions and often even to standard spellcheckers/grammar checkers (‘planification’, ‘to precise’ or ‘telematics’ for example) and words that are used with a meaning, often derived from other languages, that is not usually found in English dictionaries (‘coherent’ being a case in point). Some words are used with more or less the correct meaning, but in contexts where they would not be used by native speakers (‘homogenise’, for example)."
[0] https://www.eca.europa.eu/Other%20publications/EN_TERMINOLOG...
> * A list of separate points with an introductory statement (like this list).
> In the list above, each point is a complete sentence
Er, no, each of those is a (quite long, given the target sentence size the piece argues for) freestanding noun phrase, not a complete sentence.
One of the software engineers (an English major) I worked with at a previous gig could not get his head around the idea of writing in plan English.
He would write English at such an elaborate level that when he announced his resignation to the company via email, most people did not understand from that email that he was resigning!
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?"
It literally has no other meaning outside of the ICMP echo utility; and the onomatopoeia of hitting glass.
How did it enter the Business world?
What about in the context of a sonar system on a submarine? My first encounter of the term was probably The Hunt for Red October.
Everyone of a certain age will have seen a half dozen submarine WW2 or Cold War films so regular people do have context.
And there's nothing wrong with it.
'Learnings' is an odd word but it actually makes sense because there are no perfect substitutes. 'Insights' isn't quite it.
(a) a formal lecture given by a qualified person to a class;
(b) a fact that you learned from any person or even just a situation you were in.
"Lesson" in the sense (b) is a direct substitute for "a learning", but I have to admit a few people might sometimes interpret it as (a) and be confused. But it depends on the context - if a project report has a "lessons learnt" heading I don't think any reader is going to expect that means meaning (a).
I'll bet there are words in other languages that more perfectly capture the meaning of 'learnings' - and admittedly it's a really ugly colloquialism ... but I would accept it out of a resigned pragmatism.
There are plenty of other English words that work in context where you might use 'learning', like 'lesson', 'insight', or 'takeaway'. 'Learning' just encapsulates them all without nuance.
Pre-booking is the initial step before a complete booking.
Ticket agencies use 'pre-booking' to book the first tiny tranche of tickets.
And HR departments seem to love 'pre-authorization' to get... authorization for holidays, or purchasing, and so on.
eg you can make on the day bookings or call up HR to say you've got dave from forklifts incorporated on the phone and you need the company card immediately.
Every place I've worked with managers that speak like this has invariably produced crap.
Ping me => email/call/slack/whatsapp/zulip/telegram/meet-in-person me
I personally love "ping me". It's even shorter and more punchy, compared to "message me".
Language evolves. Shakespeare would find our English today bewildering. Instead of complaining about it, I find it most helpful to keep up with the latest lingo, and focus instead on conveying my message most clearly.
What bothers me are 'ask' and 'lift' used as nouns. They add nothing to the language, and are just ugly. Maybe my father felt the same the first time he heard 'sweet' to mean 'cool.'
Is close to a real sentence pronounced upon us from a management type during one of their endless Zoom meetings.
Someone sent in a semi-private chat shared by some of us, "They meant, we should share what we've learned."
I feel like we worked for the same company. Last time I heard this exact phrase I was participating in a meeting where one of the agenda points was feedback from a meeting about meetings.
Result: we scheduled another meeting.
Important question: did we deliver value?
"Build out" instead of just build.
"Actionable" - although it is a real word, it is a legal term, not a synonym of practical.
https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/02564513
More interesting link here: https://plainlanguage.gov
I think the difference is, that simple or basic English only uses the 1000 most common words.
That said, "ten hundred" is hardly the weirdest thing about English prose written in ten-hundred-mode...