 In this video, we're going to talk about the fifth and final principle of readability, which is simple language. So what makes language simple? Unfortunately, there's a lot of bad advice out there. When I say bad, I mean always wrong, but it's advice that is given too strongly without balance, without context. And some of those include things like avoid passives, you hear that all the time. Be informal, read conversational, avoid redundancy, avoid jargon, use simple words, use short English words, or write short texts. And while all of these contain some good, germs of good advice, for example, write short texts, but you don't want to, for example, write short texts, you don't want to deprive people of the information. So you don't want to dumb your text down just because somebody told you to write short texts. That's an example of advice that isn't really all that wrong on its own, but it can be, it's bad advice really if you apply it literally. There are some examples of advice and why it's not, when it's not appropriate. So for example, always, if you're told to avoid passes, well, for example, you have two sentences. The school was founded in 1996, and they founded the school in 1996. Obviously, the first one is much more appropriate in almost every context you can see. You can think of using that sentence. So that's not good advice. Another advice that's often given is avoid redundancy, but very often redundancy is actually what how people understand. Pairing things to the bone simply removes any other catch points that people could have. So for example, when I send an email, and I say, let's meet next Tuesday, I always put parentheses and the actual date there, and that is just to both ensure that when somebody is maybe reading it on Monday, and they don't really know if next Tuesday is tomorrow or the Tuesday after that, well, they have the backup. And also, if I made a mistake in Tuesday, I meant Wednesday, well, the date is sort of a checking point so the person can come back to me and they really mean the 24th or Tuesday. So that's a really good strategy for that. Also, using simple words is not always appropriate or it doesn't even make things simpler. So for example, you may say something like when you come to for class, remember, attendance will be taken. So that is appropriate, it's not very difficult, it's short. But of course, the more informed, more direct, simpler, quote unquote, what you're saying is we will check who showed up, but that is almost never appropriate. So make sure again that you don't take that advice too literally. Another example of this sort of simple word advice and short word advice that doesn't always work quite well is a difference between short, typical old English words and their Latinate companions. And so if I ask you which one of these is simpler, well, you would of course say get is simpler. And if I use a Microsoft word, I can now ask for it to mark complex words. And it will actually mark a choir as a complex word and it will suggest get as one of the alternatives that is not as complex. But things are not quite as simple as that because of course, if you look at the dictionary, you're going to see that get has a lot more meanings, possible meanings than a choir. And that of course is a possible source of confusion. But actually it's even worse because that has a lot more possible meanings than a choir. So you want to be careful there. And of course, if you read this on not native speakers, you will find that for example, to translate get into French, you have 15 options to translate a choir, you only have four. So again, for a non-native speaker, it may be much easier to figure out what a choir means as opposed to get. And if in Russian, it's even worse. You have 45 possible options as a verb to translate words for a choir. You only have eight. But things of course don't end there. It's even more complicated because there are 19 English phrasal verbs that can be made from get. So get across, get along, get down, get down, and so on. And so a non-native speaker will be struggling with that. Which one of these is there's something else that I need to pay attention to. They may very easily be confused by that. And it's even worse because each of these phrasal verbs has another set of senses. So the simple word get actually turns out to be much more complex than you may have thought. That doesn't mean that you actually use it, but it just means that you're not always improving things by using it, instead of a word that seems more difficult to you because you have to learn it in school. And so just the lesson there is that non-native speakers will not always find short and easy words as easy to understand as you might think. So here are some tips for a simpler language that I think help us make better decisions about what to do. So it's not so much about short words, but it's about relevant words. It's about words that either the readers know or they're explained in the text. Remember in the previous video I showed you, you can use a picture to explain spires in that. A good advice instead of being informal is to address the audience. There's actually good research that shows that if you speak to people saying, you instead of more general terms is that that will actually improve comprehension. And also it's a balance politeness a little bit because politeness can include a lot of complexity into language. So one of the things that I often see that people start with when they write something on a web page, they say welcome to this site. When they write an email, we're very pleased to have this opportunity. And that could be very often too much politeness because what was the last time you came to a website that you didn't see welcome to this site and felt insulted. That usually doesn't happen. It's just something that we do because we have nothing else to say it. So this would be some candidates for perhaps over the politeness is not very useful. Now, of course, you can take that too far. And so in the context of writing an email, sending something like that, sending me in the slides ASAP is probably not only not polite, but it's not very helpful. So you should probably include more information. But of course, there's the other extreme where you go to this flower indirect language, which is how language English expresses politeness. I was wondering if you could find some time to send me the slides. I need to do some final formatting before I leave. But actually in this sentence, perhaps the politeness is too much, but it's good to give some context. So again, we see that a bit more language is useful, but we need to find a balance between the two. Very often when you're giving instructions, you should definitely pair things down if you can. So for example, very often people write in the emails things like, you may like to register by clicking here. Whereas it's much better to say register here or just simply have an icon with a shopping basket and register. So that's a simpler way of doing things. Now you can use some tools to help you simplify your language. And a very useful thing that I like to use is called the Hemingway app. And the Hemingway app is a free online editor where you can paste your document and it's going to give you a grade and it's going to highlight long sentences. It will also highlight passive voice and adverbs. But I probably wouldn't worry too much about them. But the long sentences, hard to read sentences, are much more useful. And the overall score is also important because that tells you how many years of formal schooling your readers would, on average, have to require to be able to read the text. And you want to keep that as low as possible. Even if you're writing for quite sophisticated audiences. Because even they don't want to waste their time on decoding very complicated text unless it is academic text. So that is something to think about. So if we look at that history page that we've looked at in previous videos, well, that doesn't have very high readability. It gets grade 16, all the sentences are very long. So with a very few simple things by shortening the sentences and paragraphs, we can get to grade 11, which is much easier to read. Now, this is not always easy. So how well do the experts do on this text? Well, so this is from a page on a website by the Plain English Campaign. And as you can see, the Plain English Campaign are focusing too much, perhaps, on some of the other advice. But they could make their text much easier to read just by simply shortening the sentences and perhaps using some simple language here and there. So because they're in grade 13, and that isn't very good. They should really sort of be at grade 10 at least. Now, this is from a document that I wrote many years ago about spelling, about simple language. And I wasn't even trying to make it simpler, but I somehow managed to be better than the Plain English side by getting grade 10. So at least I was sort of following some of these. Now, this is for tips for writing plain language from the Norman Nielsen group, which we'll talk in another video. And as you can see, they talk about plain language and they get grade down. They really do a good job. But you can also see they have some sentences that are quite long. But it doesn't matter. It doesn't, some of the sentences can be longer. It doesn't mean that every sentence has to be short. But overall, it should strike a good balance of long and short sentences to make it easier to read. So the other thing, of course, when you're looking for simple language is word choice, choosing words. And very often, again, people can oversimplify. So there's a famous cartoon by XKCD that tried to describe the space shuttle by using only the 1,000 most frequent words in the English language. And using frequent words is a good idea. But if you're limited to the 1,000 most frequent ones, you're going to end up with things that are hard to say and hard to understand. So you have things like looking at the exotics. Lots of fires come out here. So that may or may not be the way you want to do it. And somebody's even made an editor for UpGor5 text editor that will only accept words that are in the top 1,000 most frequent words. And so when I've tried to put in bananas there, well, it didn't know bananas. So I tried, I like fruit that is yellow, but neither fruit or yellow belong in the top 1,000 words in the English language. So as you can see, that's not a good strategy. However, there are some good tools that can help you more with the words you're choosing. And one of them is the iWeb corpus. And that's a free online tool on provided by the Bergemian University. And if you go to the word section and search for a word, then it will give you an overview of the word. It will give you the definition just like a dictionary synonyms, synonyms just like a thesaurus. But more importantly, it will give you all the different uses of the word. So it will show you the most common collocations. For example, what is it like when it's next to another mound? Now, different clusters. So you're going to see what it's like if it's three words together and so on. But it will also show you different topics in which it is used. And it will give you some other information there as well, as well as the sort of general frequency of the word. So that's going to give you much better information about the word than simply looking at whether it's in the top 1,000 words or very simple. And the one more thing that you can also get is quickly see it in context. That's called a keyword in context or quick. And here you quickly can scan through the different uses of the word and see if using it appropriately or maybe if it's an appropriate word for your purposes. So that is about word choice, which is the last tip for making your language simpler. So in the next video, we're going to have a look at what we can learn from user experience research.