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Comment by iwwr | Hacker News Reader

An elevated reading level is not necessarily a sign of more thoughtful or insightful comments. It could just be contrived banality disguised as conceptual depth.

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> An elevated reading level is not necessarily a sign of more thoughtful or insightful comments. It could just be contrived banality disguised as conceptual depth.

Put simply, high reading level doesn't mean good content. (trying to prove your point :D)

"contrived banality disguised as conceptual depth"

Is it possible this phrase is an example of itself? :-)

Words that describe themselves: short, convoluted, awkward, multilingual.

Is the word (assuming it to be one) "non-self-describing" self-describing, or non-self-describing?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grelling-Nelson%20paradox

"Pentasyllabic"

      I am sure it was indented as such.

Irony: (n) - incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs

I like words, so I know a lot of words. But I try to take the wordiness way down. Why lose people who don't know the same words?

I mean, even if you don't care about losing people who don't have time to learn a more precise-but-obscure synonym, there's always people who learned English as a third language. Why alienate them just to look a little clever?

Even this comment has too many big words. If I had more time, I'd edit it down more. "alienate" would become "turn off" and "precise-but-obscure synonym" would become... I dunno, something simpler. Big obscure words that lock people out is really missing the forest from the trees.

You're only considering the negative aspect of "big words". Sure, there are many instances in which peope unnecessarily use lesser-known synonyms, but it is helpful when people utilize a vocabulary in order to be concise. I think that while the current mantra of "don't use big words so everyone can understand" is called for because of the amount of people abusing vocabulary so others will consider them intelligent, we should remain cognizant of the benefits succinct communication provides.

And it is even more important for precision, when a less common word is closer to what you want to say than a more popular one. This is one point Robert Heinlein made in Expanded Universe when he was defending Doc Smith's "space operas" and the vocabulary that was used in them. (Note that since "the map is not the territory", nothing, not your thoughts or even a physical description, can be exactly captured in words, but that doesn't mean it is not sometimes important or at least useful to try to be as precise as possible.)

This is a great comment. I've always thought 'reading level' as a bit bogus and looking at the wrong thing. When determining the quality of content I look at it from two ways. Does content convey the idea the writer intended and does the reader comprehend the idea the writer intended.

If I'm reading something I would prefer it be written as simply as possible. From a writers standpoint though this can be much harder than just explaining an idea in complex terms.

To paraphrase Pascal, "I apologize for the length of this letter, but I did not have time to make it shorter." I like to think length in this case meant complexity.

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