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Comment by dreen | Hacker News Reader

Heres a great list from GOV.UK of the kind of words to avoid when using Plain English:

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/style-guide/a-to-z-of-gov-uk-sty...

Love it. Check out “Writing for GOV.UK”[0] for more guidance.

Among interesting things to note that they strongly discourage FAQs (“if you write content by starting with user needs, you will not need to use FAQs … they are usually not frequently asked questions by the public, but important information dumped by the content editor”). The concept of FAQ has long been a pet peeve of mine, although I do believe the “question and answer” format has some merit.

[0] https://www.gov.uk/guidance/content-design/writing-for-gov-u...

A useful FAQ list must consist of questions that are actually often asked.

They represent discovered problems in the text the author didn't foresee.

> They represent discovered problems in the text the author didn't foresee.

Indeed. If certain questions are asked frequently, likely the information is not presented with audience’s actual needs in mind. Content should be updated, possibly rewritten. Putting up a FAQ shows content editor washing their hands of that responsibility.

I also find it a little rude, like “Welcome to the group of people who, despite our best efforts, didn’t manage to understand what we wrote! Here are some questions you lot keep asking…” (Of course, usually it’s not that, but rather a half-hearted attempt to be helpful and/or reduce the amount of people getting in touch with questions.)

Of course, FAQs originated in places like mailing lists and usenet groups, where it's arguably a good fit, precisely because there is no real standing body of text. The trouble is that it then got shoe-horned into being used on websites.

I think FAQs are an excellent way to present information— even information that has been previously covered— in a different way. Not everybody absorbs the same way, and not all information is presented clearly.

Perfectly-timed!

Indeed!

Also, here's the GOV.UK guide to Content Design. It completely changed the way I think about content.

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/content-design/writing-for-gov-u...

I like how they banned "empower" with no added explanation while the Rust team was bending backwards to argue that there is nothing wrong with the word when, in 2018, they controversially changed their motto to "A language empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software." (https://rust-lang.org/)

Obviously gov.uk material is of a different nature than that of a corporate motto, but it speaks to the exasperate community complaints at that time.

What's wrong with 'empower'?

It’s one of those words that used to have a different meaning but then a bunch of people started using it “wrong”, which is annoying to some people. It used to connote a legal or other official authority to do something.

Kinda like how some people don’t like hearing that their plane will be taking off “momentarily” or when people use “begs the question” to mean “raises the question”

I, for one, would very much prefer my plane not take off momentarily.

Your mileage may vary. By rather a lot.

It has become a buzzword. Sprinkle it in your text (along with "experiences", "embrace", "diverse", "engagement" etc.) and your text will be hard to argue against. Words are weapons. Just like you have to sprinkle "democracy" and "peace" in statements when you start wars as a country.

It is normally used as marketing term. There are other alternatives that don't stink of bullshit like such as allow.

TBH in the example given the above should simply be:

> A language for building reliable and efficient software.

Rust's developers are mostly very left-wing and are, in my view, over-eager to imprint their views on societal power imbalance on their technical project, the Rust language. They hint not too subtly that before them systems programming was the preserve of forthright white guys and that they're breaking that hegemony.

You could play bingo with this entire list of words to avoid in most corporate meetings I've ever been to.

Agenda, advance, deliver, deploy, facilitate, empower - all such cringy words when used out of context.

Since everyone knows this is corporate bullshit speak, I wonder if the actual function of these words is to signal that you're so high status that you can get away with not saying anything of substance. That you don't need to get your hands dirty with the real world, you can just float around in this vague space and still command a huge salary. Then you must be a powerful person who actually gets ahead through the shady under the table style of work. So if I see a successful person talking in this way, I can assume I can approach them with my nefarious plans and he'll be able to lie and deflect suspicion and successfully go through with corruption.

Beautiful. The worst is that many of these ugly words come en masse to the lips of marketing droids speaking in other languages. They can't help but pepper their stupid speeches with bad English. God how I hate that.

How else would you describe seven red lines?

I am surprised to see the list of "Words to avoid" in an alphabetical list just under "Words document" and "wifi". Cringe.

someone could write a simple grammar checker that looks for words in that list, passive voices, sentence length and whatnot and suggests alternatives. It wouldn't work without human oversight but then again, no automated checker really does.

http://www.hemingwayapp.com/

Although, as ever on these topics, it's probably worth finding out what professionals think of these tools (spoiler: not much although this is from 2014 and it's possible they've improved it since.)

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10416 "Filed by Mark Liberman under Prescriptivist poppycock"

edit: Just checked and it still rates "Silly" x 75 as "Good". "Hemingway" x 30 rates as "Post-graduate" but otherwise good. Yeah, it's still broken.

Thanks for reminding me about this! I had seen it years ago, but forgot about it till now.

I use https://languagetool.org/ for that. I have integrated this Java program in Vim as well. Every time I think I finished a piece of write, I run the ":LanguageToolCheck" command to learn that my writing still leaves a lot to be desired.

Is the Java tool directly connecting to the site for the checks or it uses some kind of local database? Is it updatable?

I use it as a local Java program and you can enable / disable all kinds of rules. You can also write your own.

I just fell in love with this list. I'm considering handing it to the very expensive consultants who make shiny presentations but tend to be very vague about how concepts get transformed into tangible things.

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