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Does anyone know why people write sentences like this? > Pinterest found AMP pages load four times faster and use eight times less data than traditional mobile
by awakeasleep 11y ago
Does anyone know why people write sentences like this?
> Pinterest found AMP pages load four times faster and use eight times less data than traditional mobile-optimized pages.
Does "Eight times less data" seem insane to anyone else? Shouldn't it be "one eighth the data" or "twelve and a half percent of the data"
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, because I always see things written like the article and it seems to make ~zero~ sense.
- dajohnson89 11y agoNope, not just you. I suspect it's because most readers are afraid of fractions.
- nostrademons 11y agoIt's because of parallelism. Not the computing kind, but the writing kind. Sentence constructions like "AMP pages load four times faster and use one-eighth the data" or "AMP pages have one fourth the latency and eight times better data compression" read awkwardly; try reading them aloud, vs. the original sentence. You're taught in writing class to use equivalent constructions for all clauses within a sentence. It's much like the stylistic rule in programming languages to not mix camelCase and snake_case in the same file.
- dajohnson89 11y agoI get what you're saying, but FWIW I honestly have no problem with the non-parallel sentence constructions in your example. It's a technical article. I want a high amount of information in a concise and clear package.