Why simpler isn’t always clearer
Image: in the public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
A lot of our work at Red Pony involves simplifying technical language to make it accessible to a wider audience, who may not be familiar with industry terminology, be it government acronyms, financial jargon or technobabble.
This is work I strongly believe in: if an idea has value, then it deserves to be understood by all of the people who might benefit from it. In a democracy there is a presumption that government documents should be publicly available, as much as safely possible, so that citizens can inform themselves on matters of public policy. Keeping these documents intelligible contributes to that aim, in a small way.
Scientists can be some of the worst offenders when it comes to obscure language. Theo Anderson of the Sanger Institute challenged his fellow scientists to describe their work using the Up-Goer Five Text Editor, which only allows the thousand most commonly used words. (The name comes from webcomic xkcd’s attempt to describe the Saturn V rocket.)
The results were often cute:
Our body doesn’t like to have visits from other things that don’t look like friends. When they come inside us, our cells look at them with many different types of eyes. They are not usual eyes, they work like little hands too and grab things. All-in-one they catch the stranger and they eat it. Once eaten, they show the left-over little pieces to their cell-friends. So that they know what kind of bad guys to fight.
(Immunologist @Analobpas, talking about C-type lectins)
But they also prove the point that simpler isn’t always the same as clearer. It’s difficult to argue that ‘the black rock we use to find our way when we go far away’ is easier to understand than ‘magnet’.
Sometimes the five-syllable word will be exactly the right one to use.
This made me think of the Hemingway app, which people will regularly send you a link to if they know you’re a writing nerd. It scans your writing for things Ernest Hemingway would disapprove of: long sentences, too many adverbs, polysyllabic words and so on.
But here’s the thing: when I ran the first thousand words of The Sun Also Rises through the Hemingway app the report didn’t come back with top marks. Eleven of the 49 sentences were declared ‘very hard to read’ and a further seven just ‘hard to read’. There were 11 too many adverbs, and eight times when a phrase could have been replaced by something simpler.
So apparently not even Hemingway writes like Hemingway.
