9 ms·

How to Be Clear

195 points by hypomnemata 6y ago

tzmudzin 6y ago
„Clarity of writing usually follows clarity of thought. So think what you want to say, then say it as simply as possible.” (from: The Economist Style Guide) I recommend the whole Guide wholeheartedly.
- FPGAhacker 6y ago
  Not really commenting on the guide, but for me, clarity of thought follows writing. Not the reverse.
  - munificent 6y ago
    Yup. For me the process is something like: 1. Think that I know something. 2. Write about it. Realize I didn't know it anywhere near as well as I thought. 3. Reflect on and actually understand thing. 4. Edit writing now that I actually know what the hell I'm talking about.
    - jacobr1 6y ago
      And further than that, even if when do know most the pertinent details, the best way to communicate them is probably not the jumbled order it appears in your head, nor is it even some "logical" order (such a timeline or logical argumentation). Writing for clarity often involves careful consideration of how to sequence the information such that it can be consumed given the audience and knowing when to elide details or otherwise footnote them.
  - munchbunny 6y ago
    Same, I usually end up writing anything important twice because the first draft is when I realize all of the things I hadn't thought through.
11thEarlOfMar 6y ago
Tangentially, this is obviously targeting business or team communication and it's a great collection of practical advice. It made me wonder what the corollary rule set would be when writing fiction. The advice: "Always start by thinking about what you want an audience to understand, know, or do after they’ve seen a piece of communication," could be expanded to include 'feel' or 'envision' or 'wonder'. In some ways, it would call for de-tuning the precision and intentionally introducing vagueness, demotic or evocative language.
- mncharity 6y ago
  Much science outreach and popular media prioritizes "engagement" and "interest", above understand/know/do. I recently wondered if one might get more "understand", by authoring content with an added objective of setting up the reader/viewer to "do" bite-sized storytelling - with friends, family, water cooler - thus perhaps both broadening impact, and adding motivation towards understanding. Fun frame.
  - hammock 6y ago
    So... Viral content?
    - mncharity 6y ago
      Viral storytelling? Hmm, there's a thought. So one challenge with designing a story to be told, is how to make it stable. Else it becomes a source of misconceptions, rather than of understanding. If the story is then passed on further, that becomes the telephone game, and stability... becomes even harder. Status quo disinclination to pass on (pervasively flawed) understanding does have benefits. So what if it were paired with a bit of traditional viral content, to provide a stable reference? How might one get the two, oral storytelling and viral content, to propagate together? Perhaps if the setup for storytelling was itself the viral content? Somehow search keyed so someone in receipt of only the oral, could recover the viral? Or if the viral had additional value, perhaps compelling video, so there was incentive to present both? Hmm. Fun morning brainstorming - thanks!
drewcoo 6y ago
This advice is for getting people to understand without much thinking. That's not always the goal.
cambalache 6y ago
"Resist the urge to appear smart"
- pattisapu 6y ago
  "I quite agree with you," said the Duchess; "and the moral of that is -- `Be what you would seem to be' -- or, if you'd like it put more simply -- `Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.'" -- Lewis Carrol, "Alice in Wonderland"
ape4 6y ago
For the sharps bin a diagram or icon would be useful.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
gjvc 6y ago
"Think about what your readers might already know." This alone is an excellent starting point. You know the feeling of dismay when someone starts talking beneath your level of understanding and you fear they'll never go above it? Thinking about what your audience (written or spoken) might already know is the intelligent, considerate, and efficacious thing to do.
- brundolf 6y ago
  And the opposite is exceedingly frustrating: when someone starts explaining something in terms of base concepts you've never even heard of, and you have to stop them every few seconds to fill in the blanks (and then some of those explanations have holes of their own, etc). In some cases you may be so new to a topic that you don't even know which questions to ask, so it's impossible for you to shepherd them into telling you what you need to know.
  - jacobr1 6y ago
    This is when I find good teachers/explainers switch to analogies - however imperfect they might be.
- anchpop 6y ago
  I'm writing a primer on music theory, and I have this same fear. I resolve it in three ways: 1) I try to make the writing entertaining enough that people won't mind reading something they already know 2) I added an anchor tag saying "click if you already know this stuff" 3) I added tooltips explaining vocabulary words, so if you skipped a section and end up not knowing everything you thought you did, you can use the tooltips to refresh your memory. These three factors I think combine in a really nice way. I'm excited to post it here when I'm done with it.
murgaan 6y ago
This makes me sad. Instead of educating ourselves, we're supposed to give up and write for the lowest common denominator, whose reading skills continue to erode. I don't need my technical documents to read like DFW, but let's not take all the fun out of it.
- hackerbob 6y ago
  It shouldn't. Everyone's time should be respected. Clarity and conciseness in writing or in speech is a great way to show that.
- coldtea 6y ago
  I think those are two separate matters: Indeed the average reading skills seem to continue to erode (or, at least, attention spans have been shown to decline, the Flynn effect has stalled, and functional iliteracacy of supposedly educated people is at an all times high) ... but we still should strive for clarity, whether we're addressing the average Joe or DFW (perhaps you've meant EWD?).
munificent 6y ago
I'm personally not a fan of the author's writing style. You can fetishize minimalism and clarity to the point that it undermines your goal. But the content here is good. In TODO list form, I suggest anyone writing something think through: 1. Who are you writing to? 2. Why are you writing to them? 3. What do you want them to know? 4. What do they already know? 5. What style of writing is most effective for this audience and intention? What remains is to use 5 to describe the difference between 4 and 3 in order to accomplish 2. The primary challenge is that 1 is often not a single person and the wider the audience you choose, the fuzzier all of the subsequent answers become. The single best thing you can do to become a stronger writer is to be courageous about selecting a narrow audience.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  > I'm personally not a fan of the author's writing style. Agreed. The paragraphs are too short and are not as freestanding as they should be. For instance the following should have been folded into the preceding paragraph, which provided the vital context: > But that’s often the cause of the failure. I also find it jarring to read a sentence beginning with and or but, although not everyone agrees with me that it's poor style.
  - jfengel 6y ago
    I find myself beginning sentences with conjunctions. I try to edit it out most of the time, but I'm not fanatical about it. I think it reads more clearly to the original writer than it does to a reader. You're absolutely correct about the paragraphs. A paragraph is a tool for organizing your document. If you have only one sentence per paragraph, you're sacrificing that tool. You already have the period to separate sentences, so you should use paragraph separators to group sentences into a coherent thought. The rule of thumb is 3-5 sentences per paragraph. It's not ironclad, but if you find yourself breaking it often, you're probably doing something wrong.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    There is a specific case where you start a sentence with 'but': when you want to give someone time to accept the previous statement before demolishing it. This is what we all know, and we all agree that we see it. But what we know is not right, and here's why. If a person is using And and But equally, they just like the mental pause between their statements. The period is more of an ellipsis. If your reader needs a mental pause before an And, before a second piece of information, maybe your information is too dense and you should free the new information to stand alone. Possibly in a new paragraph. As in, "The other thing that's cool about this process is that it also does blah. Which is useful for these reasons..." I don't know how other people develop a theory of a system, but if you want to change mine, if I want to change mine, I have to 'walk into it' see what's wrong with it, deconstruct it and put it back together the new way. If you don't bring me through this, I'm going to make you stop talking, back up, and walk me through it anyway. Otherwise your next best outcome is that later than night when I'm brushing my teeth I realize you're right and we pick it back up tomorrow. If it's in writing, I can only make you back up by skipping back a few paragraphs, or writing a response that you may or may see. If your proposal is too woo, I'll just be writing you off entirely.
foobarbecue 6y ago
Is "PLEASE REMEMBER TO PARTIALLY CLOSE THE SHARPS BIN" supposed to be an example of doing this correctly, or incorrectly? I find the notice unclear, but it's also unclear what point the author is trying to make by using this image.
- MauranKilom 6y ago
  The fun part is that this depends entirely on the audience. Not only the demographic, but also what prior instructions they received. Seeing that sign without further context, I assume this is a bin full of sharpies (could be wrong), and that it is supposed to be left slightly open. How closed "partially" closed is I would have to guess. But if this is for a group of students in an art class that have all been clearly instructed how to handle this bin (see "remember to"), it might be the perfect reminder. Meaning "Close it to the degree you've been shown in the first lesson".
  - FPGAhacker 6y ago
    I know this is beside the point... It’s a bin for medical waste in the form of things that can break the skin. Used needles etc. It’s a special bin that once completely closed is intentionally quite difficult to open again.
jcun4128 6y ago
I did notice it's easy to mislead/derail people trying to help you by not being clear... I always feel awkward when that happens. (context of debugging)
throwawayboise 6y ago
Related to this topic, from 2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14808374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14808374
50 6y ago
Clarity in (argumentative, essay, etc) writing is taking upmost care of your reader: you want to hold the hand of the reader and guide them towards a new understanding with little to no strain.
sylvainr65 6y ago
Excellent post. I should add that text formating is almost as important as what you want to say. 11 short sentences addressing 4 points packed in a single paragraph is really painfull to read. Use paragraphs, new lines and bullet points as much as you can. Let the reader breath.
glacials 6y ago
The MIT OpenCourseWare talk How to Speak by Patrick Winston is a great lecture on this subject: https://youtu.be/Unzc731iCUY https://youtu.be/Unzc731iCUY
soheil 6y ago
> Write shorter sentences, with simpler words What is the urge to write shorter sentences? Short sentences are akin to verbose code in a language like Java. Every new sentence you write must include the essential components of a sentence, the skeleton, for it to be grammatically correct or in Java: public static void method1(String[] args) public static void method2(String[] args) public static void method3(String[] args) This is wasted effort that could have been saved if one was to simply reuse the same sentence to add more nuances to it. After all human languages are extremely powerful and the mere fact that it is possible to compose complex sentences is a sign that some found them more advantageous. An average German sentence is probably 2 or 3 times longer than an English one, I think this has more to do with the users of the language than the language itself, if true it means we can make English pack more punch we just have to change our perspective. I love minimalistic code but it doesn't mean code that doesn't do much, minimalism means packing as much into as little as possible, the final result after adding all sentences will be significantly shorter compared to if single-purpose-shorter sentences were used. It's also the same type of religiosity with unit testing and TDD that turns codebases into monstrosities and shift focus away from understanding to mere correctness. Non-nuanced sentences in the form of tweets and their corrosive impact on culture and communication are probably another adverse side effect of this devoutness to shorter sentences.
- aynsof 6y ago
  I wouldn't typically nitpick grammar on this site, but I believe you're trying to demonstrate a point and I want to refute it. >> An average German sentence is probably 2 or 3 times longer than an English one, I think this has more to do with the users of the language than the language itself, if true it means we can make English pack more punch we just have to change our perspective. Grammatically speaking, this should be three separate sentences. Your commas should be full stops because they represent three separate thoughts. You could connect them with 'and', but I'd suggest most native speakers would find this unpleasant to read. I don't want to make it sound like I'm not a fan of long sentences - I think fiction writing benefits from a varied cadence. For business writing, however, I think short- or medium-sized sentences are less intrusive to the average reader.
- jacobr1 6y ago
loloquwowndueo 6y ago
Maybe start by writing a better headline? Clear about what? Does it show me how to be as clear as a piece of glass? ... sigh
dijereedan 6y ago
Easier said than done
z3ugma 6y ago
This is a great opportunity to talk about the worst-written sign I have ever seen. The "slippery when wet" signs at Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport read: ** Caution Please be careful while using the restroom. For your safety, we remind you that flooring can be very slippery when wet. Your safety is our concern. ** https://imgur.com/Uh9DrLh https://imgur.com/Uh9DrLh These make me so irrationally frustrated. Why do they use such flowery language? What purpose does that serve? There's no call to action, how does it improve the user experience?
- SignalNotSecure 6y ago
  There is no purpose to these signs aside from limiting liability in the eyes of the court system when you slip and fall and sue them. It's similar to the signs that say no trespassing.
- unabst 6y ago
  Ya, it should just read "slippery when wet". Maybe add an exclamation mark to show urgency and that you care. So how we would describe the sign is usually what it should say. Like, "STOP".
  - jacobr1 6y ago
    Or in this case "Caution" which usually is the largest text on these type of signs. Caution and some indication they are referring to the floor, which could just be contextual. The queue that these signs are often short will natural indicate the eye to look at the floor, so that is nice when it works out.
majestik 6y ago
Dislike authors writing style. Here’s an excerpt with bad grammar: — If you’re struggling to picture what clear writing looks like, buy a copy of the Financial Times or The Economist. Pay attention to the way articles their are written, to the word choices and sentence structures. —- Ironic
- lackbeard 6y ago
  What's wrong with that excerpt? How would you improve it?
  - edmundsauto 6y ago
    > If you’re struggling to picture what clear writing looks like, buy a copy of the Financial Times or The Economist. Pay attention to the way articles their are written, to the word choices and sentence structures. Try the Financial Times or the Economist for strong, clear writing. In particular, pay attention to their word choice and sentence structure.
vinodkd 6y ago
Advance apologies for coming across strong, but for an article advocating clarity, it is utterly devoid of an examples of how to actually achieve it. If your title starts with "How to..." you should SHOW, not TELL, and the article was a whole lot of telling. And the one example that was accidentally there - the image at the top - did not clarify if it was a good one or not (see discussion here, for example). Others have found issue with the grammar and sentence structure of the article, I found it totally opaque. Show me an example of a mental model (or the absence of one). Pull an excerpt from the Times or the economist and contrast it with another publication that is not clear. Wouldnt this help us "understand, know and" eventually "do"? And given that the advice is to think about your audiences and communicate with purpose, please do ask yourself: What is the purpose of this article? If it's to tell us to strive for clarity, please show us how, don't just tell us to do so.
unabst 6y ago
Clarity and brevity are good, but when everyone is focused, no one is talking. Silence is the sound of everyone working. Talking can be a symptom of mismanagement. Also, better English won't help when the goal is to dodge work or responsibility, which is often what's behind miscommunicating team members. A well spoken excuse is still a poor excuse.
penguoir 6y ago
tldr "Use your brain to think of words that are good"

195 points by hypomnemata 6y ago

„Clarity of writing usually follows clarity of thought. So think what you want to say, then say it as simply as possible.” (from: The Economist Style Guide) I recommend the whole Guide wholeheartedly.

FPGAhacker 6y ago
Not really commenting on the guide, but for me, clarity of thought follows writing. Not the reverse.
- munificent 6y ago
  Yup. For me the process is something like: 1. Think that I know something. 2. Write about it. Realize I didn't know it anywhere near as well as I thought. 3. Reflect on and actually understand thing. 4. Edit writing now that I actually know what the hell I'm talking about.
  - jacobr1 6y ago
    And further than that, even if when do know most the pertinent details, the best way to communicate them is probably not the jumbled order it appears in your head, nor is it even some "logical" order (such a timeline or logical argumentation). Writing for clarity often involves careful consideration of how to sequence the information such that it can be consumed given the audience and knowing when to elide details or otherwise footnote them.
- munchbunny 6y ago
  Same, I usually end up writing anything important twice because the first draft is when I realize all of the things I hadn't thought through.

11thEarlOfMar 6y ago

Tangentially, this is obviously targeting business or team communication and it's a great collection of practical advice. It made me wonder what the corollary rule set would be when writing fiction. The advice: "Always start by thinking about what you want an audience to understand, know, or do after they’ve seen a piece of communication," could be expanded to include 'feel' or 'envision' or 'wonder'. In some ways, it would call for de-tuning the precision and intentionally introducing vagueness, demotic or evocative language.

mncharity 6y ago
Much science outreach and popular media prioritizes "engagement" and "interest", above understand/know/do. I recently wondered if one might get more "understand", by authoring content with an added objective of setting up the reader/viewer to "do" bite-sized storytelling - with friends, family, water cooler - thus perhaps both broadening impact, and adding motivation towards understanding. Fun frame.
- hammock 6y ago
  So... Viral content?
  - mncharity 6y ago
    Viral storytelling? Hmm, there's a thought. So one challenge with designing a story to be told, is how to make it stable. Else it becomes a source of misconceptions, rather than of understanding. If the story is then passed on further, that becomes the telephone game, and stability... becomes even harder. Status quo disinclination to pass on (pervasively flawed) understanding does have benefits. So what if it were paired with a bit of traditional viral content, to provide a stable reference? How might one get the two, oral storytelling and viral content, to propagate together? Perhaps if the setup for storytelling was itself the viral content? Somehow search keyed so someone in receipt of only the oral, could recover the viral? Or if the viral had additional value, perhaps compelling video, so there was incentive to present both? Hmm. Fun morning brainstorming - thanks!

drewcoo 6y ago

This advice is for getting people to understand without much thinking. That's not always the goal.

cambalache 6y ago

"Resist the urge to appear smart"

pattisapu 6y ago
"I quite agree with you," said the Duchess; "and the moral of that is -- `Be what you would seem to be' -- or, if you'd like it put more simply -- `Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.'" -- Lewis Carrol, "Alice in Wonderland"

ape4 6y ago

For the sharps bin a diagram or icon would be useful.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

gjvc 6y ago

"Think about what your readers might already know." This alone is an excellent starting point. You know the feeling of dismay when someone starts talking beneath your level of understanding and you fear they'll never go above it? Thinking about what your audience (written or spoken) might already know is the intelligent, considerate, and efficacious thing to do.

brundolf 6y ago
And the opposite is exceedingly frustrating: when someone starts explaining something in terms of base concepts you've never even heard of, and you have to stop them every few seconds to fill in the blanks (and then some of those explanations have holes of their own, etc). In some cases you may be so new to a topic that you don't even know which questions to ask, so it's impossible for you to shepherd them into telling you what you need to know.
- jacobr1 6y ago
  This is when I find good teachers/explainers switch to analogies - however imperfect they might be.
anchpop 6y ago
I'm writing a primer on music theory, and I have this same fear. I resolve it in three ways: 1) I try to make the writing entertaining enough that people won't mind reading something they already know 2) I added an anchor tag saying "click if you already know this stuff" 3) I added tooltips explaining vocabulary words, so if you skipped a section and end up not knowing everything you thought you did, you can use the tooltips to refresh your memory. These three factors I think combine in a really nice way. I'm excited to post it here when I'm done with it.

murgaan 6y ago

This makes me sad. Instead of educating ourselves, we're supposed to give up and write for the lowest common denominator, whose reading skills continue to erode. I don't need my technical documents to read like DFW, but let's not take all the fun out of it.

hackerbob 6y ago
It shouldn't. Everyone's time should be respected. Clarity and conciseness in writing or in speech is a great way to show that.
coldtea 6y ago
I think those are two separate matters: Indeed the average reading skills seem to continue to erode (or, at least, attention spans have been shown to decline, the Flynn effect has stalled, and functional iliteracacy of supposedly educated people is at an all times high) ... but we still should strive for clarity, whether we're addressing the average Joe or DFW (perhaps you've meant EWD?).

munificent 6y ago

I'm personally not a fan of the author's writing style. You can fetishize minimalism and clarity to the point that it undermines your goal. But the content here is good. In TODO list form, I suggest anyone writing something think through: 1. Who are you writing to? 2. Why are you writing to them? 3. What do you want them to know? 4. What do they already know? 5. What style of writing is most effective for this audience and intention? What remains is to use 5 to describe the difference between 4 and 3 in order to accomplish 2. The primary challenge is that 1 is often not a single person and the wider the audience you choose, the fuzzier all of the subsequent answers become. The single best thing you can do to become a stronger writer is to be courageous about selecting a narrow audience.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago
> I'm personally not a fan of the author's writing style. Agreed. The paragraphs are too short and are not as freestanding as they should be. For instance the following should have been folded into the preceding paragraph, which provided the vital context: > But that’s often the cause of the failure. I also find it jarring to read a sentence beginning with and or but, although not everyone agrees with me that it's poor style.
- jfengel 6y ago
  I find myself beginning sentences with conjunctions. I try to edit it out most of the time, but I'm not fanatical about it. I think it reads more clearly to the original writer than it does to a reader. You're absolutely correct about the paragraphs. A paragraph is a tool for organizing your document. If you have only one sentence per paragraph, you're sacrificing that tool. You already have the period to separate sentences, so you should use paragraph separators to group sentences into a coherent thought. The rule of thumb is 3-5 sentences per paragraph. It's not ironclad, but if you find yourself breaking it often, you're probably doing something wrong.
- hinkley 6y ago
  There is a specific case where you start a sentence with 'but': when you want to give someone time to accept the previous statement before demolishing it. This is what we all know, and we all agree that we see it. But what we know is not right, and here's why. If a person is using And and But equally, they just like the mental pause between their statements. The period is more of an ellipsis. If your reader needs a mental pause before an And, before a second piece of information, maybe your information is too dense and you should free the new information to stand alone. Possibly in a new paragraph. As in, "The other thing that's cool about this process is that it also does blah. Which is useful for these reasons..." I don't know how other people develop a theory of a system, but if you want to change mine, if I want to change mine, I have to 'walk into it' see what's wrong with it, deconstruct it and put it back together the new way. If you don't bring me through this, I'm going to make you stop talking, back up, and walk me through it anyway. Otherwise your next best outcome is that later than night when I'm brushing my teeth I realize you're right and we pick it back up tomorrow. If it's in writing, I can only make you back up by skipping back a few paragraphs, or writing a response that you may or may see. If your proposal is too woo, I'll just be writing you off entirely.

foobarbecue 6y ago

Is "PLEASE REMEMBER TO PARTIALLY CLOSE THE SHARPS BIN" supposed to be an example of doing this correctly, or incorrectly? I find the notice unclear, but it's also unclear what point the author is trying to make by using this image.

MauranKilom 6y ago
The fun part is that this depends entirely on the audience. Not only the demographic, but also what prior instructions they received. Seeing that sign without further context, I assume this is a bin full of sharpies (could be wrong), and that it is supposed to be left slightly open. How closed "partially" closed is I would have to guess. But if this is for a group of students in an art class that have all been clearly instructed how to handle this bin (see "remember to"), it might be the perfect reminder. Meaning "Close it to the degree you've been shown in the first lesson".
- FPGAhacker 6y ago
  I know this is beside the point... It’s a bin for medical waste in the form of things that can break the skin. Used needles etc. It’s a special bin that once completely closed is intentionally quite difficult to open again.

jcun4128 6y ago

I did notice it's easy to mislead/derail people trying to help you by not being clear... I always feel awkward when that happens. (context of debugging)

throwawayboise 6y ago

Related to this topic, from 2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14808374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14808374

50 6y ago

Clarity in (argumentative, essay, etc) writing is taking upmost care of your reader: you want to hold the hand of the reader and guide them towards a new understanding with little to no strain.

sylvainr65 6y ago

Excellent post. I should add that text formating is almost as important as what you want to say. 11 short sentences addressing 4 points packed in a single paragraph is really painfull to read. Use paragraphs, new lines and bullet points as much as you can. Let the reader breath.

glacials 6y ago

The MIT OpenCourseWare talk How to Speak by Patrick Winston is a great lecture on this subject: https://youtu.be/Unzc731iCUY https://youtu.be/Unzc731iCUY

soheil 6y ago

> Write shorter sentences, with simpler words What is the urge to write shorter sentences? Short sentences are akin to verbose code in a language like Java. Every new sentence you write must include the essential components of a sentence, the skeleton, for it to be grammatically correct or in Java: public static void method1(String[] args) public static void method2(String[] args) public static void method3(String[] args) This is wasted effort that could have been saved if one was to simply reuse the same sentence to add more nuances to it. After all human languages are extremely powerful and the mere fact that it is possible to compose complex sentences is a sign that some found them more advantageous. An average German sentence is probably 2 or 3 times longer than an English one, I think this has more to do with the users of the language than the language itself, if true it means we can make English pack more punch we just have to change our perspective. I love minimalistic code but it doesn't mean code that doesn't do much, minimalism means packing as much into as little as possible, the final result after adding all sentences will be significantly shorter compared to if single-purpose-shorter sentences were used. It's also the same type of religiosity with unit testing and TDD that turns codebases into monstrosities and shift focus away from understanding to mere correctness. Non-nuanced sentences in the form of tweets and their corrosive impact on culture and communication are probably another adverse side effect of this devoutness to shorter sentences.

aynsof 6y ago
I wouldn't typically nitpick grammar on this site, but I believe you're trying to demonstrate a point and I want to refute it. >> An average German sentence is probably 2 or 3 times longer than an English one, I think this has more to do with the users of the language than the language itself, if true it means we can make English pack more punch we just have to change our perspective. Grammatically speaking, this should be three separate sentences. Your commas should be full stops because they represent three separate thoughts. You could connect them with 'and', but I'd suggest most native speakers would find this unpleasant to read. I don't want to make it sound like I'm not a fan of long sentences - I think fiction writing benefits from a varied cadence. For business writing, however, I think short- or medium-sized sentences are less intrusive to the average reader.
jacobr1 6y ago

loloquwowndueo 6y ago

Maybe start by writing a better headline? Clear about what? Does it show me how to be as clear as a piece of glass? ... sigh

dijereedan 6y ago

Easier said than done

z3ugma 6y ago

This is a great opportunity to talk about the worst-written sign I have ever seen. The "slippery when wet" signs at Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport read: ** Caution Please be careful while using the restroom. For your safety, we remind you that flooring can be very slippery when wet. Your safety is our concern. ** https://imgur.com/Uh9DrLh https://imgur.com/Uh9DrLh These make me so irrationally frustrated. Why do they use such flowery language? What purpose does that serve? There's no call to action, how does it improve the user experience?

SignalNotSecure 6y ago
There is no purpose to these signs aside from limiting liability in the eyes of the court system when you slip and fall and sue them. It's similar to the signs that say no trespassing.
unabst 6y ago
Ya, it should just read "slippery when wet". Maybe add an exclamation mark to show urgency and that you care. So how we would describe the sign is usually what it should say. Like, "STOP".
- jacobr1 6y ago
  Or in this case "Caution" which usually is the largest text on these type of signs. Caution and some indication they are referring to the floor, which could just be contextual. The queue that these signs are often short will natural indicate the eye to look at the floor, so that is nice when it works out.

majestik 6y ago

Dislike authors writing style. Here’s an excerpt with bad grammar: — If you’re struggling to picture what clear writing looks like, buy a copy of the Financial Times or The Economist. Pay attention to the way articles their are written, to the word choices and sentence structures. —- Ironic

lackbeard 6y ago
What's wrong with that excerpt? How would you improve it?
- edmundsauto 6y ago
  > If you’re struggling to picture what clear writing looks like, buy a copy of the Financial Times or The Economist. Pay attention to the way articles their are written, to the word choices and sentence structures. Try the Financial Times or the Economist for strong, clear writing. In particular, pay attention to their word choice and sentence structure.

vinodkd 6y ago

Advance apologies for coming across strong, but for an article advocating clarity, it is utterly devoid of an examples of how to actually achieve it. If your title starts with "How to..." you should SHOW, not TELL, and the article was a whole lot of telling. And the one example that was accidentally there - the image at the top - did not clarify if it was a good one or not (see discussion here, for example). Others have found issue with the grammar and sentence structure of the article, I found it totally opaque. Show me an example of a mental model (or the absence of one). Pull an excerpt from the Times or the economist and contrast it with another publication that is not clear. Wouldnt this help us "understand, know and" eventually "do"? And given that the advice is to think about your audiences and communicate with purpose, please do ask yourself: What is the purpose of this article? If it's to tell us to strive for clarity, please show us how, don't just tell us to do so.

unabst 6y ago

Clarity and brevity are good, but when everyone is focused, no one is talking. Silence is the sound of everyone working. Talking can be a symptom of mismanagement. Also, better English won't help when the goal is to dodge work or responsibility, which is often what's behind miscommunicating team members. A well spoken excuse is still a poor excuse.

penguoir 6y ago

tldr "Use your brain to think of words that are good"