Meh to verbosity, yay to simple English
As someone who likes to bandy big words around, reading journal articles really does make me swing towards the side of the simple English movement. Articles are so verbose that one tends to need to read twice or thrice before any jist becomes apparent. It really shouldn’t be so. Life’s too short.
Tagged as simplicity + Categorized as Education, Education/Instructional Design
Never try to read something in German – they are even worse. That’s because a lot of people with higher education were tortured with Latin and now they absolutely need to show off with whatever bits and pieces the remember of this extremely difficult language …!
Seriously, sometimes you just need to use register, but if 99% of the audience might have no idea what you’re talking about, you need to reconsider. My professor in Germany, Neal R. Norrick, is really really good at writing linguistically brilliant articles in an English everybody understands …Well, almost everybody.