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Cleartext: A text editor that only allows the 1,000 most common words in English
- cdevs 11y agoThe original machine had a base-plate of prefabulated amulite, surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing in such a way that the two spurving bearings were in a direct line with the pentametric fan. The main winding was of the normal lotus-o-delta type placed in panendermic semi-boloid slots in the stator, every seventh conductor being connected by a nonreversible trem'e pipe to the differential girdlespring on the 'up' end of the grammeters.
- ape4 11y agoSuggestion for the next word would be cool. Since there aren't so many.
- kbenson 11y agoOh, with the likely classifications of the word, such as verb, adverb, noun, etc, this could be really useful.
- patrickmay 11y agoA little bit of coding could eliminate the need for the user altogether!
- visarga 11y agoI like the idea. This could be enhanced with a thesaurus that would offer alternatives to difficult words. It could be a useful tool not only for writing clearer explanations, but also to compose easy readers for English learners.
- kej 11y agoYou could build that feature dynamically. When a user tries to use a disallowed word and then uses an allowed word, you could log that word pair. Combine and anonymize those logs and you'd be able to show the most likely replacement words for any word that people often try to use.
- SeanDav 11y agoAgreed. It would likely need a larger basic dictionary of allowed words and would need some ability to override the dictionary for words that just have to be in to make sense due to domain or context.
- Erik816 11y agoOh good, now I can make sure I'm following proper Newspeak!
- partycoder 11y agoThey can also include a Toki Pona translator.
- pspeter3 11y agoHave you written anything in Toki Pona before?
- partycoder 11y agoI was learning it and I could manage to understand some phrases. There are many "neologisms" for everyday items though, requires some thinking.
- drcode 11y agoGreat app, but this still doesn't address the issue of homographs, where a word can have wildly different meanings (some of them uncommon meanings) that just happen to be spelled the same. For instance, in the live example, the word "Application" is used to refer to a computer program, when the more common meaning likely refers to the verb, as in "The application of a band aid".
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- brianstorms 11y agoUnclear on why this is a good thing. Dumbing down language helps whom, exactly? I guess if you want to hasten the Idiocracy this is your app.
- blhack 11y agoIt's a joke. They even explain in the summary that it is a reference to Randall Munroe's book.
- SwellJoe 11y agoWriting so that children, people for whom English is a second language, and people otherwise unable to comprehend advanced writing, can understand you is not a bad thing. I'm considering applying this to my product documentation, even though our users are generally well-educated...we can't afford to have docs translated into a dozen languages, but simple English may be readable by enough foreign language speakers to make it worth the effort. English is a tough language; making it easier for new users of the language is great, IMHO.
- yuncun 11y agoAgreed. Some people think that big words are good. Me, I think good writing should be like good code; short and easy to understand.
- filmgirlcw 11y agoWell clarity != short/simple. Which is sort of the joke of the whole book/this idea. It can often take many more words (which just makes an idea more complicated) if you rely on this kind of idea (which yes, I'm aware is a joke) than just using the correct word. It's also very possible to get the gist of a word, based on where it is placed and the words around it -- even if you don't know exactly what it means. (Obviously I'm not suggesting that for something like documentation writing -- but by the same token I would never think that limiting yourself to a 1,000 word dictionary for something as important as product docs would be beneficial in any way).
- blhack 11y agoYou guys are missing that this is a joke. This is a reference to this comic: https://xkcd.com/1133/ https://xkcd.com/1133/. Which is poking fun at how funny things sound when you restrict yourself to only that many words.
- kf5jak 11y agoA similar editor was made for the book Thing Explainer[1] by Randal Munroe from XKCD. A book that explains all kinds of different things, from space shuttles to microwaves using the top 1000 common English words. [1] https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/ https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/
- kf5jak 11y agoI should of read everything first and would of saw the reference already made... My bad
- jsprogrammer 11y ago*have
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- dormento 11y agoJust a small nit: The words sound alike but they mean different things. You should have read everything, then you would have seen the reference. Source: grammer.
- dmlhllnd 11y agoPresumably the list includes the word "gimmick".
- dghughes 11y agoJoke or not if you haven't check out Vsauce on Youtube the Zepf Mystery it's somewhat related.
- artursapek 11y agoTrump writes his victory speeches in this.
- gregschlom 11y agoAm I the only one to find that using only the 1,000 most common words actually makes thing harder to understand? The writer ends up having to use convoluted paraphrases to refer to things where a precise, well defined and well understood word exists but it's not part of the top 1,000.
- cloudhead 11y agoYou're not the only one. Words exist exactly to avoid the problem this app creates..
- tim333 11y agoCould be handy for non native English speakers though - less to learn.
- jonathankoren 11y agoI seriously doubt it, who wants to sound like a very stupid child? This is more of an XKCD fan boy project. So let's look at a famous XKCD comic using this, "US Space Team's Up Goer Five". "US Space Team" barely makes sense, does more to obscure than illuminate, and "Up Goer Five" makes no sense at all.
- meric 11y ago"stupid" = depends on the age. Unless you meant all children are stupid....
- jonathankoren 11y agoI meant a 5 year old on the left side of the bell curve of all all 5 year olds.
- jrockway 11y agoI have to disagree with you. First off, there are many dimensions to reading new languages. Nobody is saying "learn 1000 words of English and you're done for life". Rather, achieve fluency in a subset, then work on becoming more idiomatic. If you're lost somewhere and need help, nobody cares that you sound like a stupid child. (They probably won't notice, though. I've found through learning other languages that rare words are actually very rare and of extremely limited use. Obviously if someone uses it and you don't know it, you're stuck. But you can get by without it.) US Space Team tells you what NASA does. NASA on its own tells you nothing about what they do, for all you know it could be the National Agricultural Sabotage Administration, and their goal is to blow up farms. You have to separate language out into the multiple dimensions that it encompasses in order to understand certain aspects. It's clear to me that you use language as a social signalling method, "that person doesn't know what NASA is, hah, they're dumb and I won't associate with them as a result." That's fine, but there is another aspect: explaining ideas. And that can be done with less than the full set of all English words.
- crispyambulance 11y agoJoke aside, there are ways to compute a "readability score" for any block of text. This is useful for document writers that need to target particular grade-levels for their docs (eg driving manual is "8th grade"). https://readability-score.com/ https://readability-score.com/
- rspeer 11y agoThe readability score is based only on the lengths of words, which I guess is something, but it's not a very good proxy for when you learn the word. The frequency of the word is a much better thing to measure.
- gnoway 11y agoPerfect for editing articles in Simple English Wikipedia: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
- kazinator 11y agoIt should support a few template sentences which define a word, which is then allowed to occur in the remainder of the text. More useful than a document which uses only 1000 common words is a document which uses only 1000 words, plus words which it clearly defines. I feel as if I could write almost anything if I have that, and it will be self-contained and accessible to anyone with the thousand word vocabulary, plus the ability to internalize definitions, which is a very basic faculty of the intellect.
- skystrife 11y agoThis idea reminds me of an amazing talk by Guy Steele: https://youtu.be/_ahvzDzKdB0 https://youtu.be/_ahvzDzKdB0 He starts the talk by assuming monosyllabic words as his primitives and builds up the words he needs to use to give the talk by providing definitions for them first.
- kogus 11y agoThanks for that, I really enjoyed it. Back when Java was new and cool...
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- lolidaisuki 11y agoYeah, currently this is a lisp without lambda or define.
- Spooky23 11y agoKeep in mind that the point of these exercises is to make instructions, explanations and short narratives more approachable. If describing something with a limited vocabulary is awkward and impossible, maybe your approach is too complex. My 4 year old is starting to learn how to read, and you can see in his eyes the connections made when he tries to read a basic level book. The sentence structure is obvious and predictable, and he's pretty good at getting it. With a more complex book (Ex: The Little Red Caboose), he recognizes words and "paraphrases" the story with the pictures.
- rocky1138 11y agoMan, this thing totally should have been called Newspeak.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- cowardlydragon 11y agoHow about a standard translator that takes generally accepted conversions of more complex language constructs into simpler language? How about a thing that changes less well known words and puts in easier words?
- xzephyr 11y agoFor the latter, a dictionary?
- DanBC 11y agoIf you come up with a way to automagically translate things into easier English you could probably sell it to various UK government / NHS / etc organisations, who all have a duty to make much of their communication available in "Easy Read". Here's the Equality Act Easy read version: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/85012/easy-read.pdf https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm... And the Equality Act non-easy read: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/contents http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/contents Here's a Google search for some easy read documents: https://www.google.co.uk/search?site=&source=hp&q=easy+read+inurl%3Agov.uk&oq=easy+read+inurl%3Agov.uk&gs_l=hp.3...666.8052.0.8378.23.20.0.0.0.0.410.2468.0j1j5j2j1.9.0....0...1c.1.64.hp..14.3.874.0.4Hy0Gvi2kHQ https://www.google.co.uk/search?site=&source=hp&q=easy+read+... Here's Mencap's (a charity that works with people with learning disability) guide to Easy Read: https://www.mencap.org.uk/make_it_clear https://www.mencap.org.uk/make_it_clear
- suchow 11y agoSimilarly, in the U.S. there is the Plain Writing Act of 2010 (http://www.plainlanguage.gov/plLaw/ http://www.plainlanguage.gov/plLaw/).
- dallamaneni 11y agoCheck EasyWrite: Cleartext alternative for the web: https://github.com/adeekshith/easy-write https://github.com/adeekshith/easy-write
- lsiebert 11y agoIt's interesting to see people criticizing a software tool for it's potential uses and effect on society when that tool isn't cryptography.
- dallamaneni 11y agoThere is a web version of this which I made a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11424197 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11424197
- devy 11y agoAnd this was submitted before as well. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11367972 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11367972
- stared 11y agoTo make it simple, you would need to use <=1000 words _and_ avoid phrasal verbs. Otherwise it is a kind of cheating (at least, in English).
- eracer001 11y agoWould love a slider that would allow you to adjust the words allowed from 500 most common words in English to 10k most common words. Also, it would be great if you could compile a windows version.
- threatofrain 11y agoWhile this is probably a joke, I would note that a person is rarely writing for consumption by all demographics. Vampire novels, comic books, chemistry textbooks, all have their audiences, and it is naive to say "but one day the whole world may wish to read my book, I must open the gates as wide as possible", because accessibility is not a free. Don't simplify or complicate your language without reason.
- skybrian 11y agoA while back a friend wrote an Android app for this: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fallinghawks.upgoer https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fallinghaw...
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- jotux 11y agoIt's neat but not very useful. I'd actually be interested in an editor that enforces E-Prime[1] to see if it made writing more clear. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime
- zzkt 11y agohttps://github.com/AndrewHynes/eprime-mode https://github.com/AndrewHynes/eprime-mode
- kkylin 11y agoThanks! My first question upon seeing this post was: isn't there already an emacs mode for this?
- throwanem 11y agoThere is now: https://github.com/aaron-em/ten-hundred-mode.el https://github.com/aaron-em/ten-hundred-mode.el (There was before, under the name "1000-words.el", but it isn't very good, and it also isn't, and can't easily be made, available via MELPA. So I wrote this instead. The PR to add it to MELPA is open and awaiting review; pretty soon you should be able to M-x package-install RET ten-hundred-mode RET and get it.)
- jjar 11y agoThe author of the book already made this. https://www.xkcd.com/simplewriter/ https://www.xkcd.com/simplewriter/
- macintux 11y agoAttempting to type the Gettysburg Address, which is how I usually experiment with word processors and keyboards, is an exercise in futility. > Eight times ten and seven years ago our fathers brought into the world a new country, born of free thoughts and doings, and completely sold on the idea that all men are created the same.
- j2kun 11y agoIf you made a special case for numbers and fudge the clause structure, it's not that bad. > Eighty-seven years ago our fathers brought into the world a new country, born of free thoughts and doings and the idea that all men are created the same.
- Nutmog 11y agoFutility? It looks like an improvement on the original: "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." "free thoughts and doings" sounds clearer that "liberty", which could mean almost anything - did it have no prisons? I guess they really meant freedom from England's control, which isn't quite free thoughts and doings - that goes to show how poorly worded the original was.
- macintux 11y agoThem's fightin' words. If the Gettysburg Address is poor writing, life has no meaning.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- dm03514 11y agoThe aim of Newspeak is to remove all shades of meaning from language, leaving simple concepts (pleasure and pain, happiness and sadness, goodthink and crimethink) that reinforce the total dominance of the State
- logfromblammo 11y agoWhenever I hear the word "amazing", the association that leaps most readily to the fore of my brain is the word "doubleplusgood".
- tomc1985 11y agoThing Explainer was a nice experiment.... but that's exactly what it was. An experiment... not to be repeated. English has such a wonderfully rich vocabulary... and no cow is too sacred for the 'innovators' of tech. Everyone: prepare to talk like 6-year-olds!
- gertef 11y agoGuy Steele's _Growing a Language+ is a much better model than "1000 most common words" https://www.google.com/?#q=growing+a+language https://www.google.com/?#q=growing+a+language
- aaroninsf 11y agoOooo I would like to apply this as a filter, for various thresholds, to various favorite works of e.g. fiction. Not with and replace; just a hard filter... very Oulipo... The resultant word count plots would I am guessing cluster by author, maybe other things (genre?)...
- nxzero 11y agoTo provide some context, Wikipedia has a version that's written using "Plain English" that's based on limited set of common English words: https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page Haven't had the chance to use the tool, but sounds like a good first step to making English text easier to read.
- frenchie4111 11y agoIt would be nice if it there was a setting that would make it not delete a word, but mark it in red. That way I can copy/paste things into it.
- libeclipse 11y agoI don't believe this is a good idea. Limiting yourself to the 1000 most common words does not necessarily lead to clarity or simplicity.
- WalterBright 11y agoI read years ago that the vocabulary used on TV was about 2,000 words. A high school graduate has a vocabulary of 10,000 words, a college graduate 30,000, and there are a million words in the English language. What was interesting to me was that I could learn a foreign language by only learning 2,000 words!
- rewrew 11y agoThat is interesting. What about languages other than English? Any idea about the avg. word count needed to learn them? (Used on TV does seem like a good benchmark for "learned). Or is it roughly the same for every language, do you think?
- WalterBright 11y agoI have no data, but I suspect it is similar.
- bane 11y ago"being able to read a newspaper" is a typical goal for pre-fluency language acquisition. In most languages I'm aware of the number of words required to do that is something around 1500-3000.
- WalterBright 11y agoYes. But I read somewhere that a newspaper vocabulary is targeted at somewhere around a 5th grade reading level.
- baby 11y agoThe most annoying application on earth :) A better application would be to underline words not included in the whitelist and to provide a synonym included in the whitelist upon right clicking. But as I learned in school: a language's diversity is beautiful, why restrain ourselves in the vocabulary we use? In particular, a boring text with many repetition is just hard to read, see the discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11131391 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11131391
- makecheck 11y agoA great idea. See, the point is to be understood by everyone. Nothing is gained by making crazy sentences out of words that most people have never heard of. Is that supposed to impress people? I had a friend who seemed to start replacing dead-simple phrases like “seriously!?” with “are you being facetious!?”. Ugh, this doesn’t help at all. It will either scream “hey, everyone, I learned a new word!!!” to the people who know what you said, or “say what!?” to anyone else; and they will be too busy parsing your words to hear whatever you say next. And this advice isn’t because everyone you meet will be 6 years old or a high school drop-out. Simple words are: (1) WAY easier to pick up for everyone, and (2) many people are not using their native language, including very smart people in fields where people like big words.
- sogen 11y agoCheck also Rewordify [1], provides suggestions alongside the original text, has "difficulty" settings, and more, very complete website, highly recommended. I spent ages looking for something like this. 1.- https://rewordify.com/index.php https://rewordify.com/index.php
- EGreg 11y agoI am reminded of this talk: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/steele.pdf https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/steele.pdf
- rexf 11y agoIt would be a huge usability improvement to have autocompletion of valid words. Currently, you have to type each word, and wait to see if it is rejected/removed. Instead of waiting for each word to be typed, why not show acceptable words as you are typing, so you can tell before you finish typing if it is valid.
- austinstorm 11y agoDelightfully Orwellian.
- bikamonki 11y agoSo we can all write like potheads think! Before downvoting me, and you will, do consider that I have zero scientific evidence for the above sarcastic comment; however, anecdotally speaking, all long-term pot smokers that I happen to know seem to speak with 1000 common words, or less.
- grondilu 11y agoAs anyone ever written an artistically worthy novel with only those 1,000 words? Sounds like an interesting lipogram. Also, is there a Vim plugin to do that?
- cpeterso 11y agoLucy Aikin was an 19th century author who wrote novels using single-syllable words, including versions of Robinson Crusoe and The Swiss Family Robinson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_Aikin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_Aikin
- cpeterso 11y agoI wrote a simple editor that used Google Translate's web service to round-trip translate the text you enter in real time. I had been thinking about intermediate representations that might assist in the automatic translation of human languages. I wanted to see how one's writing might change to ensure that the round-trip translation was identical or still made sense, thinking this would improve the odds that the translated version actually meant what you intended it to.
- cloudjacker 11y agoThis allows more than the top 1000 words. The dictionaries clearly have 3000 lines
- caf 11y agoWhat would be interesting is a greasemonkey script that scales the size of words to be proportional to the log of their frequency.
- snurk 11y agoThis sounds awful. We need clear grammar, not limited vocabulary. There's evidence of limited vocabulary and lazy expression in too many venues.
- traviswingo 11y agoI think this is really great. I have just tasked the people in my company to use this to explain our company in 100 words or less, without losing context and making sense. :p
- lallysingh 11y agoActually, a version of this as an aspell dictionary would be lovely. Have your favorite editor highlight all the words that don't fit.
- Brajeshwar 11y agoHemingway[1] is a good editor too. It does not have word limitations. It does a good job to make sure your sentences are not complex, long, and boring. 1. http://www.hemingwayapp.com/ http://www.hemingwayapp.com/
- Myrmornis 11y agoOuch, that first example. "Hard to figure out for people"?
- personjerry 11y agoI feel like this would be much better as, say, a dictionary file for Word; the restriction seems too aggressive (i.e. what if I want a name?).
- vph 11y agoDon't mean to sound like an insult, but this is the first tool (that I know of) intentionally designed to make people stupider.
- parallel 11y agoThis might actually be really useful when communicating online with developers overseas who don;t speak English natively. Recently started using upwork and found myself rewriting instruction to use common words.
- michaelhoney 11y agoI can see a text compression scheme coming up. Convert a string to a list of numbers, use a lookup table, done.
- jshevek 11y agoI think this is a cool project. I appreciate that the creator has shared this with the world. I think its sad that people are (appear to be?) criticizing him simply for making it and sharing it. However.... "If you find yourself on the receiving end of a message that is too hard to figure out, do everyone a favor and insist on a simpler version. Do _everyone_ a favor? Presumptive. If I am on the receiving end of a message that is too hard for me to understand due to my ignorance of certain terms, or due to difficulties I have parsing grammatically correct writing, then the best way for me to do everyone a favor is to work on improving my own vocabulary and/or thinking ability. Then I will be better equipped to communicate well with a larger set of the population, and better equipped to reason well. Improving your own thinking skills is good citizenship. Improving your ability to communicate well with a wider swath of the population can help you to build bridges between communities. If I were instead to insist that the message achieves 'clarity' by accommodating my ignorance, then I may be helping some but certainly not everyone. "Maybe one that only uses the 1,000 most common words." Asking others to accommodate limitations to my vocabulary is likely to increase their cognitive load; most often I'd rather them apply themselves more fully to other tasks. I can just use a dictionary! Also, this runs the risk of resulting in text that is _harder_ to understand, if they trade precise terms for needlessly convoluted grammar.
- giardini 11y agoHow about modifying it so one can choose to use the 1,000, or 2000, 5000, or 10,000 most common words, for instance? Should be pretty easy and done dynamically (although tuning the number _down_ would require more work).
- galago 11y agoHas no one mentioned Basic English yet? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English
- hyperpallium 11y agoI guess it must ignore proper names, like Trump and Randall, detected by capitalization.
- SixSigma 11y agoThe irony that four words in the title are not in that 1,000 (in quotes here) A "text" "editor" that only allows the 1,000 most "common" words in "English. As determined by a similar online version that merely underlines words outside the vocabulary : http://splasho.com/upgoer5/ http://splasho.com/upgoer5/
- aquarin 11y agoCould this application suggest substitutions from 1000 word list?
- bootload 11y ago"Use it to tell your family members why their computers act up, or tell people at work why they should pay you more." Very clever application. You could use this idea to only describe problems using a dictionary of known nouns/verbs to describe technical problems using a known vocabulary.
- tempodox 11y agoThere are already enough agents out there trying to dumb us down. And I don't want to be one of them, so thanks, but no thanks.
- dintech 11y ago"At last!" he said. "My good sir! This is remarkable!" Although in Trob the last word in fact became "a thing which may happen but once in the usable lifetime of a canoe hollowed diligently by axe and fire from the tallest diamondwood tree that grows in the noted diamondwood forests on the lower slopes of Mount Awayawa, home of the firegods or so it is said."
- horsebattery 11y agoWhat about Windoze & Linuts users?
- rasz_pl 11y agoThis could actually be useful if it had buildin word2vec dictionary/suggestion function. Dont just delete less common words, suggest simpler one of equal meaning instead.
- jokoon 11y agoIsn't this a great opportunity to compress text. I wonder if there are algorithms that use dictionaries.
- vtlynch 11y agoI dont understand the appeal of this at all. The first demonstration gif shows how this mangles your text. Maybe this would be good for writing english for audiences who learned it as a foreign language.