Re: To be or not: An...

[Bonni Graham <bonnig -at- AOL -dot- COM>]

Tina Sansom notes:

"The point is that short words are powerful ones.  The core of our spoken
language, some high percentage like 60 to 70, is one-syllable words.  The
only two-syllable words allowed were those of four letters or less, or proper
names.

All I could manage was one paragraph of truly one-syllable words.  But is was
very strong and clear."

This raises a very good point, and yet also hits a small (and admittedly
tangential) hot button for me.  I've had to use Flesch reading scores (the
calculation for grade-level readability assigned by many grammar checkers) as
a yardstick before.  It's been quite useful, and yet there are some flaws in
the equation.

Basically (and I'm oversimplifying to a degree, so feel free to correct me if
I've generalized incorrectly), the Flesch score looks at the total number of
words in each sentence and the total number of syllables in each word, and
performs some arcane calculation to arrive at a readability score.  All very
well and good -- probably 95 times out of a hundred this will garner you a
useful score.  BUT it does not (to the best of my knowledge) take into
account the familiarity of the word -- only the length.  Thus "information"
gets a "hard" rating while "schism" gets an easy one.  Find me a thrid-grader
who doesn't understand (there's another "hard" word -- more than one
syllable!) "information."  Then find me one who understands "schism."

So I guess what I'm saying is that all these exercise to increase clarity are
just that -- exercises.  They're not the One True Way (I know, I know, no
one's saying that they are -- I just wanted an excuse to Capitalize <grin>).
As Anatole said -- they're not a replacement for judgement -- if I had
followed the readability scores exactly, I'd have had to take out all the
library jargon in my book.  If there had been simple and direct synonyms that
would have been fine.  But there weren't -- I would have had to double the
size of several phrases -- and my audience would not have known what I meant.

Is anyone else humming "It Depends on the User" yet?

Lest anyone misunderstand (for today is my offical day to Not Say Anything
Right -- I get to have one about once every six weeks), I LIKE these tools.
I think they're useful teaching (and self-teaching) devices.  I just don't
want to see anyone (i.e., upper management) go too far, if you know what I
mean ("Well, yes, I know that's a Phillips-head screw, but the company tools
guide says we can only use standard-head screwdrivers, so just do your
best...").

Bonni Graham
Manual Labour
President, San Diego STC
BonniG -at- aol -dot- com