4 ms·
Does this actually do what it claims, or is it just an illusion? The sentences highlighted in red in its example aren't particularly difficult to read. If you
by ravenstine 6y ago
Does this actually do what it claims, or is it just an illusion?
The sentences highlighted in red in its example aren't particularly difficult to read. If your audience can't understand this:
> If you see a red highlight, your sentence is so dense and complicated that your readers will get lost trying to follow its meandering, splitting logic — try editing this sentence to remove the red.
... the problem probably isn't you, but that you have the wrong audience to start with.
I'm guessing that this is just using a combination of Flesch-Kincaid, for readability scoring, and probably some libraries by Wooorm for detecting complex words and passive voice, among other things. Maybe I'm wrong.
What makes a sentence bad isn't necessarily how complex it is, but how much it is able to communicate with a given density. There's no way that traditional readability algorithms like Flesch-Kincaid can possibly score that. What would be more useful would be something that could detect vagueness of text, but haven't tried to solve this problem in the past, I found no such thing in existence.
This isn't to say that readability scores aren't useful, but they always need to be taken with a grain of salt and be used more as a guide than anything else.
- Spooky23 6y agoAll of this stuff is subjective to some extent. A newspaper columnist, novel author and manual writer will have different principles that apply to their writing. The sentence you quoted is complex, and may readers will miss meaning, especially if it is presented an instruction.
- ravenstine 6y agoFor sure because, to me, that sentence pales in contrast to the meandering prose in most news stories. Just my opinion.
- mrweasel 6y agoIt may be because I’m not a native English speaker, but the highlighted sentence is pretty hard to read. I lose track of the words around half way. After “get lost” I want the sentence to stop. My brain split the sentence right there, meaning the remaing part has no context, it’s just words the fail to belong. It’s not that I’m a poor reader. I do real slower in English, but I can easily read something like The Economist.
- shuntress 6y agoI have seen it noted by product managers that programmers tend to write with a very dense style that typically includes more context switching (for example, this sentence) than non-programmers. I also find the "dense difficult sentence" example to be neither dense nor difficult but I think this might be related to the huge amount of my life spent exercising that "writing context" brain-muscle by writing "then" statements while keeping the "if" context in mind. Edit: The point being, these guidelines are not universal and will have varied relevance among different works/audiences.