These tips were centered around simplification, and they are good tips. For documentation and technical writing in particular, I picked up a few mannerisms that I now use every time I write.
The biggest impact has been to have a goal of limiting a paragraph to 2-3 sentences. From this goal my other writing traits came naturally.
When starting a paragraph, start off with a blunt statement that summarizes the paragraph. Following sentences can back up the summary sentence.
Use a short single-sentence paragraph to make an emphatic point.
Do word qualifiers add to your content? Many times not. Humans add qualifiers and adjectives more than what's necessary to understand a concept.
Readers get bored with monotony. If there's a wall of text, that's boring. If there's a wall of images, that's boring too. I try to break up a document into different types of formatting. Lists, headings, quotes, and image/content sections to make things visually appealing.
These are only goals! Sometimes a big honkin' paragraph is just what the doctor ordered.
Fun language or a well-timed joke keeps things interesting. They can give the reader a well-deserved break. Like the big honkin' paragraph usage above.
Lastly, the presentation of the content is important. Medium got their content width, font size, and colors down well. GitHub did a great job, too.
I learned to do this when a publisher took red ink to a tutorial I wrote. They gave me the goal of shortening all paragraphs to 2-3 sentences. It was tough at first but now I'm a fan. It's a fun writing exercise :-)
IMO, this style is most effective on a screen, and on a phone screen at that. This style does not fare well on the page, nor if you're trying to write on a complicated subject. It has the unfortunate feeling of superficiality. Many ideas or points require more than 2 or 3 sentences of explanation. And some ideas require many, many, sentences to present and explain. Worse, too many paragraph breaks can disrupt the flow and rhythm of an argument or article and create the expectation that you are once again introducing a new idea before the last one was allowed to reach a satisfying point. What can seem more direct for the writer, can equally come across as annoying for the reader.
I also think this style is based on the incredible low expectations we now have for the ability of readers to keep their attention, but that's another argument all together. Read some Henry James and you'll see walls of text that achieve a stunning clarity all their own.
Short, standalone paragraphs are very emphatic, though, if used sparingly.
> Read some Henry James and you'll see walls of text that achieve a stunning clarity all their own.
I take it you mean his non-fiction, given the subject? I stumbled on this - I'd be happy to hear some other recommendations - this isn't prose I'd generally look for in a contemporary text that tries to teach a subject - it's too dense for that, I believe:
I was recommending Henry James in reference to readers attention spans, who often balk at the idea of reading anything quite as dense as from James' writings. But they're missing out. His famous Chp. 42 from Portrait of a Lady is the single best articulation of personal reflection on a failed marriage I have ever read - ever. [0] Losing out on that simply because it's a big imposing paragraph suggests an unwillingness to challenge oneself, which, I think at least, is only to our loss as our attention spans wane.
Specifically for non-fiction, I would recommend R.G. Collingwood, a philosopher of ordinary language who was writing in the late 1930's. His writing, like many philosophers from that time, balances depth with clarity with stunning skill. His introduction to his book "The Principles of Art"[1] is one of my favorite bits of writing ever because of just how clear it is. The paragraphs are often long, but they are meticulously edited to keep forward momentum, and a sense of dawning awareness of a problem which he is solving, present without dragging the reader down. Most of all they are calm. It never seems rushed, or forced, or over-pruned. It's a rhetorical style of instruction that only works when you incorporate length into your writing.
As an aside, the first sentence in the introduction is one of my favorite openings of all time.
"The business of this book is to answer the question: What is art?"
It's worth making explicit: this helps native-language readers too! Scholarly papers full of garden path sentences are mocked for a reason. Convoluted writing is hard for everyone to understand.
I totally agree. When the word "accessible" comes up, people often think of disabled people who have permanent disabilities.
That's only a subsection of how accessibility helps - there's temporal accessibility and cultural accessibility (and probably even more facets). Curb cutouts and automatic doors help people with wheelchairs. But it also helps people carrying large packages in their hands, or are riding a bike.
Similarly, accessible writing helps people who are feeling tired, are distracted, or are trying to skim the material.
English gardens are often designed to appear wild. A garden path wanders, showing you only a small amount of what is there at any moment. Thus a "garden path sentence" is one that wanders from one subject to another. You are meant to enjoy the experience of walking through it, not the beauty of the master plan of angles and viewpoints (as compared to most Continental gardens, like Versailles or Schoenbrunn). There are exceptions on both sides, of course.
But the point is that "garden path sentence[s]" are more random, more free and loose.
While I admire your commitment to practicing what you preach, I can't help but think that you've taken it further than it's meant to go, though in a way that's hard to place. But it feels ... abrupt. Offensively effusive. A stream of emphatic points without a break.
I respect your commitment to a particular style, but... I hate it. It feels like there's no connection between statements, just a sequence of atomized declarations. Writing that makes an argument often needs longer paragraphs. You may be limiting what you can say by the format you have to say it in.
Now that you've done the stunt for your publisher, it may be time to transcend this style.
> I try to break up a document into different types of formatting. Lists, headings, quotes, and image/content sections to make things visually appealing.
I'm sorry, but I have to disagree. It's very difficult for me to follow textbooks that have 200 different colors and 5 sidebars per page.
You would probably like law textbooks. They are just prose, mostly with in-line citations rather than footnotes. No colored sections and only only a rare sidebar. They make reading, serious 100+ page each sitting reading, much easier. There is only one voice to follow and your eyes never need to bounce around the page.
Short paragraphs are great in an online forum. In anything else they become very difficult. And starting paragraphs with one-sentence points is a gradeschool rule. Often a two-sentence point is more effective (see above). The only universal answer to becoming a better writer is to read more. Read material from people you think are good writers. The more good writing you read the easier it will be for you to create your own. But watch/read too much british stuff, accidentally call an elevator a lift, and everyone thinks you are british spy.
> The biggest impact has been to have a goal of limiting a paragraph to 2-3 sentences. From this goal my other writing traits came naturally.
This makes your writing, including the comment I'm responding to, slower and harder to read. Paragraphs give text a higher level structure by logically grouping related sentences. Without that grouping, it's a soup of needlessly double-spaced sentences strewn across too much vertical space.
"Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard."
- David McCullough
I agree with many of the other posts here. Some of the translations highlighted in the article seem to either lose important information or introduce confusing information. The most striking example for me was the translation from
> A strong tremor in her hand makes it impossible for her to use American Sign Language.
to
> Her hand shakes so she does not do sign language.
I agree that "tremor" is an uncommon word and some of the adjectives like "strong", "impossible", and "American" are either superfluous or not strictly necessary. But in the translation, the phrase "hand shakes" coincides with an unrelated but very common thing: a "handshake". This gave me a slight pause when reading. And it's not like it's impossible to do sign language with shaky hands. In this case, it's the degree with which Kyra's hands shake that keeps her from doing sign language, something that is lost in the translation.
All this said, I want to stress that I agree with the premise of the article. We should value accessibility, and writing style is yet another vector that can exclude people. Quibbles about specific sentences shouldn't distract us from that. If anything, they and the lack of an effective algorithm to do this highlight how difficult the task is and probably always will be. Writing well is really, really hard. And the diversity of the audience for this kind of writing I think compounds that.
In fact, I might argue that writing plainly is harder. I think scientific/academic writing can often be considered lazy because it doesn't take the time to consider the audience. This isn't always true, but I think I'm not alone in having slogged through a paper or an article that could have used an editor. But it didn't get sufficient editing because, and again I stress, writing well is really, really hard.
Agreed. I found the first sentence immediately understandable, and the second one confusing and ambiguous.
> A strong tremor in her hand
The fact that "tremor" is uncommon helped me instantly understand that this was a medical condition, and "strong" helped me understand that it's debilitating for her. It sounds long-lived, if not permanent.
> Her hand shakes
Ok ... is it a medical condition, or a nervous tick, or just a bad habit? Is it really strong or just a light, well, tremor? And of course as you pointed out, the confusion with with other words like "handshake", and the fact that "shakes" is transitive, so we could be about to read "Her hand shakes the salt shaker". "Tremor" is not transitive, so my mind doesn't need to leave open a branch that could accept another noun as part of it.
> [condition] makes it impossible for her to ...
Ok, her condition is really bad. We should not expect her to be able to lots of other things, either. Please don't ask her about it; it could be embarrassing.
> [condition] so she does not do ...
"so" should have a comma before it. "Her hand shakes so" is actually a complete sentence, which leaves room for "Her hand shakes so; she does not do" as being more separable thoughts rather than one being the consequence of the other. This is yet another possible "branch" of the sentence that my mind has to leave open while trying to understand it.
She does not do it? That is so much more ambiguous than "it is impossible for her".
The only possible improvement is the omission of the word "American", but that's not even clear: it gives us additional information about the subject (i.e., she is American) since it's already clear that any sign language would be hard for her.
And dropping "american" both changes the meaning and reveals the mind of the translator. There are other sign languages, some perhaps easier for those with hand tremors. I think it safe to say that only a fellow american would drop that adjective to make the sentence more readable.
I'd like to add another citation from Nicolas Boileau (17th century) that my father used to tell me frequently: "Whatever is well conceived is clearly said, And the words to say it flow with ease." ("Ce que l'on conçoit bien s'énonce clairement, et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément.")
I think about it often especially when someone tries to explain something and it seems hard, very often this means it's also hard for them.
Being able to explain something (clearly) to someone else is a great way to measure your own understanding. The more complete your understanding, the better your ability to communicate it.
As a non native english speaker, I can clearly understand the first sentence "A strong tremor in her hand makes it impossible for her to use American Sign Language". Even if we do not know the meaning of tremor (this french word is not used since long), we can easiliy guess that it is an illness in the hands and not lose much from the understanding of the sentence. For the second sentence, I have to think a lot more to understand the structure of the sentence and to remove the ambiguities. After reading the second sentence, I am far less confident in my understanding than afer reading the first one.
There are some improvements in the "more readable" text, but also some noticeable regressions:
"Born premature" is an established turn of phrase. You read it, you know exactly what is meant. "Born early" is not an established phrase. You have to think about it more. It could mean "born early in the morning" or "born before her time" or "born prematurely". You can figure it out, it's not rocket science, but it's a little papercut of having to expend some effort. You have to think and pick the most likely meaning.
"Very small when she was born" is readable enough, though you do have to spend a bit of effort discarding the possibility that the author is simply drawing attention to the fact that babies are small to set up some future point.
"She has trouble seeing" is not as clear as the original "...which has impacted [...] eyesight". True, "impacted" is unwieldy and could be improved, but the causal link between the premature birth and the health difficulties is no longer explicit and must now be inferred, taking more mental effort from the reader.
Most of the changes are fine. But there are two big losses in translation:
[ A strong tremor in her hand makes it impossible for her to use American Sign Language. ] --> [ Her hand shakes so she does not do sign language. ]
No, she _cannot_ do sign language. The difference between "does not" and "cannot" is big. Rebecca gives no explanation for this corruption of the original meaning.
[ Her parents think she recognizes a couple dozen signs. ] --> [ Her parents think she knows some signs. ]
She cannot make signs with her hands, but she can recognize signs. The word "recognizes" is important because it expresses that she can in fact use sign language, but only one way -- to receive communication, not to send it. Changing this to "knows" eliminates this information and makes this sentence contradict with the preceding one. It is now clear that "do sign language" in the preceding sentence also obscures this information; "do" is vague and hard to understand.
How many is "some"? "Some" could mean 3, or 30, or 300. Again Rebecca's explanation is lacking; this is described as "replacement of numbered items" but in fact it is just straight deletion of all numbers.
So, I would write:
[ Her hand shakes so she cannot speak in sign language. Her parents think she understands about 20 signs. ]
This is clear, easy to read, doesn't needlessly destroy information, and in my opinion is easier to read than Rebecca's simplification.
> "She has trouble seeing" is not as clear as the original "...which has impacted [...] eyesight". True, "impacted" is unwieldy and could be improved, but the causal link between the premature birth and the health difficulties is no longer explicit and must now be inferred, taking more mental effort from the reader.
It's even worse, because "seeing" is often used metaphorically e.g. "She has trouble seeing his point" and "She has trouble seeing how she can find a job." "Eyesight" specifies that the seeing we're talking about has to do with eyes.
I agree - the causal link is very important to note.
In terms of born premature vs born early, I understand that premature is the medical term. As a medical student, I also understand that it can be helpful to use more precise words in describing a situation.
However, I personally think that a lot of our medical jargon is due for simplification. For example, is there really any benefit to saying "epistaxis" rather than "bloody nose", or "rhinorrhea" rather than "runny nose"?
In the case of "born early" - premature and preterm are already interchangeable. I wouldn't mind adding born early to the mix.
From my outside perception, the medical jargon is ripe with greek-latin derived words that are strictly descriptive, adding no causal information whatsoever. My understanding is that the word tachycardia does not give an insight into why the heart beats faster.
As for "born early", I think it misses the actual problem. I think "born too early" is a closer-to-the-spirit simplification.
The way they rephrased also simply omitted detail, which doesn't seem like a fair comparison. I'd much rather see an example where no detail is lost but would still have wider comprehension. Literally dumbing it down by stripping detail doesn't seem like a clear best practice.
It’s impossible to express the same content using simpler words without making the text much longer, which defeats the purpose of making it easier to read.
The more precise a term is, the more it expresses without added verbiage, but it’s also less likely to be widely understood.
This rather mixes simpler/more difficult and shorter/longer as equivalent - even interchangeable - aspects of writing. But these are not transitive: shorter is not simpler, nor is simpler (i.e., more understandable) necessarily shorter; similarly, a longer piece isn't more difficult simply by its length.
Writing is hard; writing clearly - more understandably - is harder yet. Writing precisely, which would link some concepts of length/wordiness directly with understandability and clarity, is the hardest of all.
"If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter" - Blaise Pascal
Premature is a medical term that's a little hard with someone with an intellectual disability to parse unless they're already familiar.
If you don't have that knowledge retained it's a much larger leap to figure out what "premature" means. you have to understand the prefix (pre = before) and know what "mature" means in this context (not old, but rather "not ready").
This complicates the fact that premature birth also requires a lot of prior understanding (why can a baby be born too early? why is that a problem?)
Perhaps the author could have elaborated a little with plain language... "Born too soon" might be clearer.
> Kyra is autistic and profoundly deaf. She was born premature at about 27 weeks, just a little over 2 pounds, which has impacted pretty much everything: eyesight, hearing, digestion, sleep patterns. A strong tremor in her hand makes it impossible for her to use American Sign Language. Her parents think she recognizes a couple dozen signs.
The most important thing when writing is to know your audience. Given the goal the original ProPublica article (talking about how the the state of Arizona is not helping disabled children) the original paragraph is preferable because it succinctly and clearly communicates how serious Kyra’s problem is.
In the first sentence, “profoundly deaf” has a specific meaning and conveys the seriousness of the disability. Similarly, 27 weeks is a lot more helpful than “born early”. Many children are born before 40 weeks (early) and generally anything after 36 weeks (after the lungs have developed) is pretty uncomplicated. However, 27 weeks is very early and has a high complication rate and requires state of the art neonatal intensive care. In addition, 2 pounds is very small for a baby(average is around 7 pounds) and again requires a lot of high tech medical care just to survive until what would be full term.
In addition the words “tremor” combined with “impossible” conveys the severe medical nature of the problem more so than “shaking”. In addition, with the simple version, it is ambiguous whether using sign language is because of preference (self-conscious) or because it is impossible.
Again consider the goals of the original article. It is to point out the injustice that a child with a severe medical problem is not getting the care and help she requires and deserves. The original wording does a much better job of making this case.
The most important thing in writing is knowing your audience and your goal.
Well you can write very simple English and still be difficult to read. This is from Benjamin Jowett's translation of Plato's Parmenides:
> If the one were greater or less than the others, or the others greater or less than the one, they would not be greater or less than each other in virtue of their being the one and the others; but, if in addition to their being what they are they had equality, they would be equal to one another, or if the one had smallness and the others greatness, or the one had greatness and the others smallness — whichever kind had greatness would be greater, and whichever had smallness would be smaller?
The words are easy, the vocabulary is small, the syllable count is low. Still you almost need to break it down and draw a chart to make sense of the sentence.
You might blame the old translation, I've read this material in more modern translations as well and it honestly doesn't get better.
> The missile knows where it is at all times. It knows this because it knows where it isn't. By subtracting where it is from where it isn't, or where it isn't from where it is (whichever is greater), it obtains a difference, or deviation. The guidance subsystem uses deviations to generate corrective commands to drive the missile from a position where it is to a position where it isn't, and arriving at a position where it wasn't, it now is. Consequently, the position where it is, is now the position that it wasn't, and it follows that the position that it was, is now the position that it isn't.
Very simple words, with 3 or 4 exceptions, but it short-circuits the brain a bit if you aren't following along carefully enough.
A lot of the difficulty in the Parmenides case is that it's discussing a lot of the same concepts that appear in the discussion, such as sameness and difference.
As an aside, I do contracting work for the Swedish public sector, and come in contact with an interesting conflict of needs. They have a mandate to use easy language, but also a need for specific legal terms. As a result, they've started overloading specific meanings on common words, making sentences appear understandable (the words are simple), but really easy to misunderstand (because half the words don't mean what you would think).
I wouldn’t call a paragraph-length sentence ‘simple’. The longer the sentence, the larger the brain-buffer needed. It builds upwards in complexity like a tower. Quantised chunks are simple and digestible. Long strands of text are hard to deal with.
> Kyra is autistic and deaf. She was born early. She was very small when she was born. She has trouble seeing, hearing, eating and sleeping. Her hand shakes so she does not do sign language. Her parents think she knows some signs.
This is plain, but is this good writing? Specifically, I find the writing lack of specifics. What is "early"? What is "very small"? What does "has trouble" mean? How bad is the shake? How do we quantify "some"?
Good writing is plain and simple. Being plain and simple does not mean bland or vague.
>This is plain, but is this good writing? Specifically, I find the writing lack of specifics.
Specifics are only worthy when they are needed - that is, the core message changes without them, or the level of specificity is inefficient to convey it. This is not the case here.
>What is "early"?
Earlier than with a regular pregancy. For the intend it wants to convey (that she is autistic and deaf because of a premature pregnancy) that she was "early" is enough. If he said 6.5 months as opposed to 7 would it matter and change anything? It might even muddy the waters - if he wrote 7.6 months one might argue "hey, that's not too early" and start debating that, when the main thing this passage is intended to convey was that she was indeed born early.
>What is "very small"?
Much smaller than an average child, enough to be a result of early pregnacy and a factor for the aforementioned issues and other health concerns. Again, would exactly kilograms make any difference?
>What does "has trouble" mean?
That she doesn't see/hear/eat/and sleep as an average kid but worse. Would specifics ("she wakes every 1-2 hours" or "she can only hear under 9Khz") make any difference?
>Good writing is plain and simple. Being plain and simple does not mean bland or vague.
This is not supposed to be "good writing" whatever this means. This was intended to be "more readable" by a specific target audience.
This particular passage reminds me of the anti-example in Strunk & White about "Avoid[ing] a Succession of Loose Sentences."[0]
I know others have pointed out that the article's point is about those with intellectual or learning disabilities, or learners of foreign languages, but I wonder if this really bears out. Literary Latin is full of (extremely) periodic sentences and once one has picked up on the general prosody and feel of this practice, those sentences aren't particularly hard to understand, even as a non-native reader.
For you and me? No. As a translation for people with intellectual disabilities or people with minimal English skills that the article focuses on? Who knows; it's probably fine.
I just hope that such translations will remain translations and not replace the original.
I agree. There's a big difference between simplifying writing and just omitting all the details. The example translation is almost all detail-omitting and very little simplification. How much detail is appropriate depends on your audience; it's not a clear win to just omit all details. Otherwise I can simplify their example even more:
I think a fundamental mistake you (and other commenters on this article) are making is judging the value of the "plain" English version by whether you think it's good writing.
However, the article's intention is to use plain language to be accessible to individuals with intellectual disabilities or other difficulties in language (i.e. recent immigrants).
As a fairly well-read and educated person, I also find the "plain" version dull and uninspiring. However, I accept that the article is trying to make the point that such writing may be more broadly understandable.
For example, I recently had some relatives immigrate from a non-English speaking country. I helped them set up internet and noticed there were multiple points during the company's signup and payment process their lack of English fluency created huge hurdles.
It's interesting that the article itself isn't written in plain language, using idioms such as "posing a barrier" and many others which, according to a strict application of these rules, should be removed in favor of plainer forms [EDIT: as others have pointed out, I completely missed that you can switch the whole article to simple style. How embarrassing!]
I agree with some simplifications, e.g. "profoundly deaf" is essentially meaningless and bad style, it adds nothing over simply saying "deaf", but most other instances of paraphrased and simplified text miss something. Saying "a couple dozen" is natural language, this is how regular humans speak. What is gained by removing flavor and natural idioms from language?
To me, a lot of these simplifications sound like removing natural language and replacing it with something written by a robot, or where the target audience are children or non-native speakers. The text loses its flavor while aiming to be as simple to understand as possible; that's not a tradeoff I would choose in the majority of situations.
> "profoundly deaf" is essentially meaningless and bad style
"Profoundly deaf" is not meaningless, nor is it bad style. It is in fact a medical diagnosis. Deafness exists on a continuum, and as deafness is measured "profoundly" is the most deaf you can be.
I think for the layperson, "deaf" without any qualifier is treated the same as profoundly deaf. I think the term "hard of hearing" is used when someone exists elsewhere on that continuum for most.
I missed over the one in the header (I blame header blindness) but realized that there was alternate text on the side to the paragraphs. Now that I understand the plain text swap at the top, that's a neat way of representing it and I understand the feature a bit better.
Are you referring to the paragraph "The benefits of plain language aren’t limited to universally challenging texts like legal documents and tax forms. Even everyday writing, like news articles, can still pose a barrier for some readers."?
The included alternate plain writing sentence reads "Some kinds of writing are hard for everyone to read, like tax forms. But everyday writing, like the news, can be hard to read too." without any mention of "barrier".
Are you aware that the article is also written in the simpler style, as well? You can click on the paragraphs to toggle them.
According to this article, it seems that the way to convert 'rich' language into 'plain' language is to split it into lots and lots of small 'subject-verb-object'-style sentences.
[presses 'p']
This is an article. It has language. The language is 'rich'. 'Rich' language can be converted to 'plain' language. 'Rich' language has sentences. 'Plain' language has sentences too, but they are smaller. 'Plain' sentences usually look like "I do something", e.g. "George eats fruit". A 'rich' sentence can be split into 'smaller' sentences. 'Rich' sentences can be split into smaller 'plain' ones that look like "George eats fruit".
Hesitation. I am being honest. Do I fully agree, or not? I am not sure! More hesitation.
[unpresses 'p']
Hm ... I'm not sure if I fully agree or not to be honest...
> Hm ... I'm not sure if I fully agree or not to be honest...
The comments here seem to agree, but I'm not sure, either. I think there's merit to simplifying the structure like this, but, at the risk of projecting my own brain onto the population, these small "bullet point" sentences eliminate a lot of the _flow_ that I depend on to connect ideas together. Variety in the sentence structure, particularly length, keeps things novel enough that I don't get sucked into reading "automatically" (where I've technically read the words but digested none of them), and connecting words like because, moreover, thus, etc. give me clues about how the bullet points connect together. How one fact or statement follows from the previous.
A lot of these examples seemed to reduce the word count when making the sentence simpler. I would argue that you would want to increase the word count. For instance, you would swap out a word like 'superfluous' instead for 'more than was needed'. That way you could still give the full and rich meaning you intend, without just losing the harder words and the texture they provide.
Example(and opening myself up to criticism):
"Kyra is autistic and very deaf. She was born small and much earlier than she was supposed to. Because of this she has trouble seeing, hearing, eating and sleeping. Her hand shakes so much that she cannot use sign language to speak much at all. Her parents think she may know a couple of signs, but no more."
> Some of these are clear improvements - but many of them are simplifications that lose depth and nuance.
Some of these make writing better. Many of them just leave words out and don't say as much.
> The world is filled with detail, tailoring text to meet the needs of people unable to grasp that detail does not remove it - It obfuscates it.
There is a lot of stuff around us. Using words meant only for people who do not like a lot of stuff does not make the stuff go away. It just hides the stuff.
> Sometimes simple and direct language is good. Sometimes it makes the entire conversation devoid of usefulness or meaning.
Using simple words can be good. Sometimes it is not good enough.
> Work to understand which context is appropriate for what you write.
Use words understood by the people you are writing for.
>but many of them are simplifications that lose depth and nuance.
They reminded me of Hemingway's simple, declarative style. I know some people like it, but I always found it somewhat lacking for creating a sense of emotional connection to the characters.
In my opinion, one of the easiest ways for writers to make things more readable is to not use synonyms for technical terms. If you are a researcher and you have referred to the "cell membrane", don't turn around and refer to that same thing as the "plasma membrane", "cytoplasmic membrane" or "phospholipid bilayer" later on in your article unless you have a damn good reason.
> Writing text that can be understood by as many people as possible seems like an obvious best practice.
Not necessarily? If what you’re writing is intended for a completely general audience, or an audience that follows the distribution of an idealized general audience, maybe. And if the most important goal is understandability as well. But often writing is for purposes and audiences other than that. Taking it as axiomatic that the first and most important goal is comprehension by the widest possible audience suggests you should write at (at most) a fifth or sixth grade level. Anything above that and you’ve already failed at the “obvious best practice”.
What is easier for one audience may be more difficult for another.
Consider the original quote:
> Let’s walk through how Rebecca, an expert in plain language, translates a text to be more readable. We'll use an excerpt from her translation of a ProPublica article by Amy Silverman in the following example.
and the plain version:
> Here is an example for how to make writing easier to read. Rebecca wrote this example. She is an expert in plain language. This quote is from a news article. Amy Silverman wrote it for ProPublica. Rebecca wrote it in plain language.
In the plain version, there are six separate statements for me to process and remember. In the non-plain version, only two. They convey all the same information, but the non-plain approach clusters relevant information. It's the difference between trying to remember the number 1945 (nineteen fourty-five) and 1-9-4-5 (one, nine, four, five). You can both process and remember the former better because the information is usefully clustered.
Furthermore, as a skilled reader, it's easier to filter the non-plain one down to what I care about: "Here is an example of a plain language expert rewriting a paragraph." I find the plain version more frustrating because each plain statement seems as important as any other. No syntax clues tell me if "Rebecca wrote this example" is something I can discard.
In closing, I think this is a great article even if I disagree with the premise that simple language is a best practice. I like the article because it makes me consider how I should change my writing based on the audience.
"Plain speaking" is essentially writing for a audience with third grade reading skills. That is a losing proposition for most readers who will suffer the loss of basic information and nuance that plainspeaking entails. I believe this includes many who are now (imprecisely) labeled "disabled", like intelligent blind or deaf native English speakers or non-English speakers who value subtlety but don't want to be talked down to.
Fortunately, with the recent development of powerful natural language computer models, it is now possible to translate any writing into a simplified form using no more computing power than is available in any cell phone.
Therefore, I'd like to propose that "writing inclusively for the masses" is actually undesirable due to the inherent loss of information and style, and is unnecessary due to a rise of tech advances recently.
IMO, a better way to serve all readers is to write clearly and unambiguously in richer natural language. Then for those who desire simplification, the text can be translated into "plainspeak" as needed, using a tool tuned to perform that task, like Babelfish or Google Translate. I suspect a browser plugin also could do this for user-markedup blocks of text.
I've found the most readable text is often the text that is natural. The more you torture the wording by over-thinking it the more you diverge from natural language. Sure, you may improve it from an analytical standpoint, but a large portion of reading is a subconscious process and your subconscious doesn't like it when the writing has been poured through ten filters before hitting the page.
Really interesting article. I strongly agree with the general premise of this article.
With that said, I'm confused about algorithm 2 (difficult words). How does adding "Yes!" in front of a sentence change it from a 0.45 reading level to a 0.25?
Am I missing something?? Was something else changed in that sentence?
I also think it's interesting that the article accurately pointed out that writers will censor themselves when writing for the intellectually challenged. And yet, I see examples of censorship in this very article (intentionally or not).
For example: "In recent decades, as disability activists have won more civil rights, both in the US and internationally, accessible writing has gained greater attention." vs "People with disabilities have more rights than ever before."
I feel like leaving out "civil" from rights could be construed as censorship. After all, what good is it to know you have rights if you don't even know what type of rights they are?
There's also social register. More complex writing/speaking assumes knowledge of cultural markers which are intended to exclude those who aren't familiar with them. So writers/readers can use them as caste markers.
Simplification has to be a mix of as-simple-as-possible with as-neutral-as-possible.
I don't think the examples hit that, because they read as if they've been simplified, while successful simplification doesn't.
I like the info pages on the UK NHS site. They're as uncomplicated as they can be, they get the key facts across, but they're also very neutral.
> I like the info pages on the UK NHS site. They're as uncomplicated
as they can be, they get the key facts across, but they're also very
neutral.
Not just NHS, all of UK .gov online, leaflets and telephone services
have adopted a super high standard of communication in recent years.
Compared to the deliberately twisted legalese for tax, benefits, and
services in the 1980s it's a huge transformation. Something has
changed in the core culture.
It is mentioned in the article. They give it as an example of a pretty useless reading level algorithm.
I would have thought GPT-3 or similar could probably solve the reading level algorithm problem very easily. I thought that's where the article was going to be honest.
- The controls for the translation are intuitive and aren't distracting.
- Its use of 3 levels of examples is convincing, makes for a rather complete view of the problem and makes the points easy to understand.
- It even links to high-quality resources to learn to write more accessibly in this style! [1][2][3]
I saw a lot of comments here about information being lost in the translation process.
I understand that this may not apply directly to how you write your technical documentation. However, I think you should note that this style of writing isn't meant for everyone everywhere. You probably won't ever see papers written in this style. Its main purpose seems to be in education and communications with broader audiences where accessibility is key.
Even then, its normal to lose some subtleties as you make writing simpler. The important part isn't to keep all the information in your text, it's to make the most important information accessible with as little friction as possible.
Practicing this also helps consider which information is relevant to the message you want to convey. When painting the picture of a complex character in a poetic way, you may want to keep the subtleties of language and use words that make the text flow even if it means increasing complexity. However, if you're writing to communicate crucial information or give instructions, which happens more often in our writing than we would like to admit, it's critical that the text is simple and accessible and contains only the most relevant information.
This may be a nitpick. But the article repeatedly uses a short acronym that has a very common alternate meaning. That seems like an excellent example of something to avoid. Doubly so if you're concerned about clarity for people with lower English skill levels.
"People with ID" means "people with identification" to me. My brain was thrown off by that phrase even in the plain version of the third and fourth paragraphs.
I've often seen academics abbreviate their (highly uncommon) jargon in their papers and, short of a very firm length requirement, I don't understand why. My brain has to stop and parse it out every time I see it if the acronym isn't super common, and if you just prefer "QDs" to "quantum dots" because it's less typing then a) maybe writing papers shouldn't be the cornerstone of your profession and b) this is pretty much exactly what LaTeX macros are for.
This talks about the word and phrasing aspects of writing which is great. Another good read on the subject is On Writing Well.
It seems that a sizable chunk of developers (and academics) who write struggle with the visual aspects of writing (and I'm not saying I do it amazingly). For example, developers love not to impose width restrictions on their personal blogs. But studies show that that makes text harder to read [0]. Some great writers like danluu.com are popular despite ignoring the visual aspects of readability. (And I don't mean to pick on Dan but it's a recent site I was looking at.)
My point is that it's easier to find ways to improve on your readability concerning words and phrasing. It's not as easy to find good tips on improving visual readability too.
I agree with most of this. Using shorter, simpler sentences is something I've had to slowly learn how to do. I have worked with many people for whom English was not their first language. They are all very skilled, but I have experienced that the way I instinctively write can cause difficulty. I naturally reach for lots of dependent clauses, qualifications, and diversions. Splitting those out into separate sentences takes a little effort, but I find that it increases communication quite a lot. I try to notice myself getting too florid in messages like PR comments. And I will spend a little time rewriting them to simplify the expression.
I tried to write this comment in a "plain" style from the beginning. There are still a few items that I think could be improved. "for whom English..." might be one example.
The style of the plain English translation is hard for me to read, because it avoids commas to lower the sentence length. Is there any evidence that replacing a comma with a full stop makes a sentence easier to read, or is it just an unintended consequence of the metric?
> Is there any evidence that replacing a comma with a full stop makes a sentence easier to read
You can't generally make two grammatically-correct English sentences by starting with one and swapping a comma for a full stop, and if you can find a case where you can, it probably doesn't preserve meaning, even in the approximate (losing distinctions of how tightly coupled ideas are) sense you can with a semicolon rather than a comma.
But, generally, yes there is considerable evidence that shorter, simpler sentences (even if the total work is similar length) are easier to read, at the expense of reducing the space of ideas that can be clearly expressed.
You can't generally do it. But you can write like this. To artificially reduce sentence length. And it is really difficult to read. For a native English speaker.
It also seems like that style of writing in particular probably doesn't help reading comprehension, even though shorter sentence in general do.
Maybe it's out-of-scope but the article seems to ignore a question: what benefits are there to making writing "less readable" (or at least to write without prioritising readability).
The fact that this article has been written twice (and defaults to the "less readable" version) implies there may be some reasons. Perhaps the only reason this was done here is to provide more contrasting examples?
Ultimately, I think the rules of readability here are mostly well-known (by writers) - Orwell famously codified similar rules in Politics & The English Language. But I think writers choose to ignore them for certain reasons & that seems worth exploring.
My first encounter with simplified writing were some newspapers printed in simplified German. They say that you need to know 2000 most common words to be able to read the newspapers.
> Writing text that can be understood by as many people as possible seems like an obvious best practice.
This is exactly why everything is so terrible, maximizing for breadth and losing everything that was worth sharing in the first place. If there are people with disabilities excluded you can help them, write specifically for them, don't start writing like everyone is disabled.
My simple take on this is that simple writing is cool because sometimes I feel like rubbish and my brain sucks. Reading articles that use a wide vocubulary feels like being DDoSed because you have to read and then do a second translation parse to dumb it down.
Also, I think there's just something enjoyable about being able to boil down a complex idea into pretty simple terms.
One of the keys that is missed often is mis-reading the room (so to speak). That is, the material (e.g., a tutorial) is written for people with more (background) experience, not less. If I knew what you knew I wouldn't need your tutorial. Yet there you are speaking to me...right over my head.
This question is context sensitive in that it can only be answered if its dependent question "Who is the intended Audience?" is known. Writing contents and style should change based on audience needs. Simplification is not always better.
I love the aim here. I’m in the habit now of just chucking anything with convoluted sentences. Despite this, I detest the way they use ‘But’ in this guide. It is not proper to start a sentence with ‘But’. This is less readable!
The biggest impact has been to have a goal of limiting a paragraph to 2-3 sentences. From this goal my other writing traits came naturally.
When starting a paragraph, start off with a blunt statement that summarizes the paragraph. Following sentences can back up the summary sentence.
Use a short single-sentence paragraph to make an emphatic point.
Do word qualifiers add to your content? Many times not. Humans add qualifiers and adjectives more than what's necessary to understand a concept.
Readers get bored with monotony. If there's a wall of text, that's boring. If there's a wall of images, that's boring too. I try to break up a document into different types of formatting. Lists, headings, quotes, and image/content sections to make things visually appealing.
These are only goals! Sometimes a big honkin' paragraph is just what the doctor ordered.
Fun language or a well-timed joke keeps things interesting. They can give the reader a well-deserved break. Like the big honkin' paragraph usage above.
Lastly, the presentation of the content is important. Medium got their content width, font size, and colors down well. GitHub did a great job, too.
I learned to do this when a publisher took red ink to a tutorial I wrote. They gave me the goal of shortening all paragraphs to 2-3 sentences. It was tough at first but now I'm a fan. It's a fun writing exercise :-)