RE: Lingua Franca Today - a reflection on this discussion....

[jgarison -at- ide -dot- com]

When I taught Intro to Technical Writing, I used a similar "model" that I
got from Merrill Whitburn, a professor of technical communications at
Rensselaer.

He found a series of 5 or 6 articles written about the same subject
(day/night cycles in oysters), but  which were written for, and published
in, different magazines - ranging from The Saturday Evening Post to Journal
of Cell Biology. 

As you can imagine, the vocabulary changed markedly - from 'day/night' to
'diurnal' and so forth. The sentence structure changed too, from rather
straight-forward short sentences to excruciatingly long Latinate
constructions crafted almost totally in passive voice. 

And, so did the manner of writing also change. The more popular audience
articles made statements (Oysters show symptoms ...) while the writing for
the more esoteric audiences did not aver anything, rather it alluded almost
coyly to possibilities (A study of the literature seems to indicate that
oysters tend to react ...).

It all boils down to the same simple fact that was pointed out a few days
ago at the beginning of this thread (rope? cable?) - Know Thy Audience.

Kelley seems to know her audience pretty well. We know ours. Her choice my
not be our choices, our choices might not work for her.

Use your own cognitive functions to actually make your own decisions, but
make sure you know who's on the reading end of what you write.

My 2¢,

John



-----Original Message-----
From: Bruce Byfield [mailto:bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com]

When I was teaching first year English, I used to distribute an extract 
that explained the idea very well. Unfortunately, I no longer remember 
the writer and can't easily find the handout, but the argument went 
something like this:

The two sentences, "I saw a cat with an egg-shaped head" and "I saw a 
feline with an ovate cranium" both say more or less the same thing. 
However, the first sentence uses words that are part of most people's 
every day vocabulary, while the second uses words that most reasonably 
educated people would recognize, but would usually not see or use 
reguarly. As a result, the first sentence is comprehensible almost 
immediately. By contrast, even a very well read and educated person 
handles the second sentence by making a translation of it: "feline" = 
"cat," and so on.

<snip>

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