Quim Gil, 21/05/2013 23:15:
[...] Good journalism is mostly about a lead paragraph for the masses followed
by an increasingly dense body text (aka the 5 Ws and the inverted
pyramid). You can adapt and change these rules at will, as long as you
are aware of them.
Paying more editorial attention to the title and the lead will allow
more room for complex terminology down in the body text. And this
applies to technical posts just as much as to other posts about other
expert fields for librarians, translators, lawyers, educators...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Ws
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid
I agree that this is more useful, with the caveats by Lodewijk.
As for our English texts, aside from jargon, their main deficiency is
IMHO usually in not considering language diversity. The issue is very
apparent in our requests for translations: often, you have very "simple"
and short sentences which are translated in a way that reverses their
meaning upside down. An article or pronoun implicit in English, if
misunderstood by a native speaker of a language where the article or
pronoun matters, is enough to spoil an entire text. What to do?
1) Some time ago I added some short leaflets here, but more and better
resources are needed:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Writing_clearly#Advice_from_the_experts
2) An automatical service we'd benefit from is one which takes a text
and highlights all idiomatic expressions (which may be obvious in USA
English but mean the opposite in UK English or just nothing for most
people), formal/literary expressions (which may mean nothing for most
native speakers and at the same time be obvious for speakers of another
language more closely related to them) etc.
Let me also add that – personally – I have no problems reading and
understanding sentences spanning multiple pages, if they were written by
Proust (who always has a reason), but I have big problems understanding
texts which lack coherency and focus. English texts composed by many
scattered short sentences, without conjunctions and other sentence
connectors, are for me very painful to read. However, it seems most
people prefer to have many small concepts and to connect the dots
themselves to get the figure as they can.
Nemo
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia-l mailing list
[email protected]
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
