What makes writing more readable?
pudding.cool
pudding.cool
The biggest impact has been to have a goal of limiting a paragraph to 2-3 sentences. From this goal my other writing traits came naturally.
When starting a paragraph, start off with a blunt statement that summarizes the paragraph. Following sentences can back up the summary sentence.
Use a short single-sentence paragraph to make an emphatic point.
Do word qualifiers add to your content? Many times not. Humans add qualifiers and adjectives more than what's necessary to understand a concept.
Readers get bored with monotony. If there's a wall of text, that's boring. If there's a wall of images, that's boring too. I try to break up a document into different types of formatting. Lists, headings, quotes, and image/content sections to make things visually appealing.
These are only goals! Sometimes a big honkin' paragraph is just what the doctor ordered.
Fun language or a well-timed joke keeps things interesting. They can give the reader a well-deserved break. Like the big honkin' paragraph usage above.
Lastly, the presentation of the content is important. Medium got their content width, font size, and colors down well. GitHub did a great job, too.
I learned to do this when a publisher took red ink to a tutorial I wrote. They gave me the goal of shortening all paragraphs to 2-3 sentences. It was tough at first but now I'm a fan. It's a fun writing exercise :-)
I also think this style is based on the incredible low expectations we now have for the ability of readers to keep their attention, but that's another argument all together. Read some Henry James and you'll see walls of text that achieve a stunning clarity all their own.
Short, standalone paragraphs are very emphatic, though, if used sparingly.
I take it you mean his non-fiction, given the subject? I stumbled on this - I'd be happy to hear some other recommendations - this isn't prose I'd generally look for in a contemporary text that tries to teach a subject - it's too dense for that, I believe:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/60040/60040-h/60040-h.htm#Pa...
That said, I certainly agree that telegram style can get tiresome, and even hinder communication.
Many poisons are merely too big servings of a remedy.
Specifically for non-fiction, I would recommend R.G. Collingwood, a philosopher of ordinary language who was writing in the late 1930's. His writing, like many philosophers from that time, balances depth with clarity with stunning skill. His introduction to his book "The Principles of Art"[1] is one of my favorite bits of writing ever because of just how clear it is. The paragraphs are often long, but they are meticulously edited to keep forward momentum, and a sense of dawning awareness of a problem which he is solving, present without dragging the reader down. Most of all they are calm. It never seems rushed, or forced, or over-pruned. It's a rhetorical style of instruction that only works when you incorporate length into your writing.
As an aside, the first sentence in the introduction is one of my favorite openings of all time. "The business of this book is to answer the question: What is art?"
---
[0]: http://www.online-literature.com/henry_james/portrait_lady/4...
[1]: https://books.google.ca/books?id=SXpMC9416y4C&printsec=front...
That's only a subsection of how accessibility helps - there's temporal accessibility and cultural accessibility (and probably even more facets). Curb cutouts and automatic doors help people with wheelchairs. But it also helps people carrying large packages in their hands, or are riding a bike.
Similarly, accessible writing helps people who are feeling tired, are distracted, or are trying to skim the material.
FYI, as a non-native English speaker, I have no idea what a "garden path sentence" means.
But the point is that "garden path sentence[s]" are more random, more free and loose.
Now that you've done the stunt for your publisher, it may be time to transcend this style.
I'm sorry, but I have to disagree. It's very difficult for me to follow textbooks that have 200 different colors and 5 sidebars per page.
This makes your writing, including the comment I'm responding to, slower and harder to read. Paragraphs give text a higher level structure by logically grouping related sentences. Without that grouping, it's a soup of needlessly double-spaced sentences strewn across too much vertical space.
- David McCullough
I agree with many of the other posts here. Some of the translations highlighted in the article seem to either lose important information or introduce confusing information. The most striking example for me was the translation from
> A strong tremor in her hand makes it impossible for her to use American Sign Language.
to
> Her hand shakes so she does not do sign language.
I agree that "tremor" is an uncommon word and some of the adjectives like "strong", "impossible", and "American" are either superfluous or not strictly necessary. But in the translation, the phrase "hand shakes" coincides with an unrelated but very common thing: a "handshake". This gave me a slight pause when reading. And it's not like it's impossible to do sign language with shaky hands. In this case, it's the degree with which Kyra's hands shake that keeps her from doing sign language, something that is lost in the translation.
All this said, I want to stress that I agree with the premise of the article. We should value accessibility, and writing style is yet another vector that can exclude people. Quibbles about specific sentences shouldn't distract us from that. If anything, they and the lack of an effective algorithm to do this highlight how difficult the task is and probably always will be. Writing well is really, really hard. And the diversity of the audience for this kind of writing I think compounds that.
In fact, I might argue that writing plainly is harder. I think scientific/academic writing can often be considered lazy because it doesn't take the time to consider the audience. This isn't always true, but I think I'm not alone in having slogged through a paper or an article that could have used an editor. But it didn't get sufficient editing because, and again I stress, writing well is really, really hard.
> A strong tremor in her hand
The fact that "tremor" is uncommon helped me instantly understand that this was a medical condition, and "strong" helped me understand that it's debilitating for her. It sounds long-lived, if not permanent.
> Her hand shakes
Ok ... is it a medical condition, or a nervous tick, or just a bad habit? Is it really strong or just a light, well, tremor? And of course as you pointed out, the confusion with with other words like "handshake", and the fact that "shakes" is transitive, so we could be about to read "Her hand shakes the salt shaker". "Tremor" is not transitive, so my mind doesn't need to leave open a branch that could accept another noun as part of it.
> [condition] makes it impossible for her to ...
Ok, her condition is really bad. We should not expect her to be able to lots of other things, either. Please don't ask her about it; it could be embarrassing.
> [condition] so she does not do ...
"so" should have a comma before it. "Her hand shakes so" is actually a complete sentence, which leaves room for "Her hand shakes so; she does not do" as being more separable thoughts rather than one being the consequence of the other. This is yet another possible "branch" of the sentence that my mind has to leave open while trying to understand it.
She does not do it? That is so much more ambiguous than "it is impossible for her".
The only possible improvement is the omission of the word "American", but that's not even clear: it gives us additional information about the subject (i.e., she is American) since it's already clear that any sign language would be hard for her.
I think about it often especially when someone tries to explain something and it seems hard, very often this means it's also hard for them.
(Yes, there are exceptions and outliers.)
"Born premature" is an established turn of phrase. You read it, you know exactly what is meant. "Born early" is not an established phrase. You have to think about it more. It could mean "born early in the morning" or "born before her time" or "born prematurely". You can figure it out, it's not rocket science, but it's a little papercut of having to expend some effort. You have to think and pick the most likely meaning.
"Very small when she was born" is readable enough, though you do have to spend a bit of effort discarding the possibility that the author is simply drawing attention to the fact that babies are small to set up some future point.
"She has trouble seeing" is not as clear as the original "...which has impacted [...] eyesight". True, "impacted" is unwieldy and could be improved, but the causal link between the premature birth and the health difficulties is no longer explicit and must now be inferred, taking more mental effort from the reader.
[ A strong tremor in her hand makes it impossible for her to use American Sign Language. ] --> [ Her hand shakes so she does not do sign language. ]
No, she _cannot_ do sign language. The difference between "does not" and "cannot" is big. Rebecca gives no explanation for this corruption of the original meaning.
[ Her parents think she recognizes a couple dozen signs. ] --> [ Her parents think she knows some signs. ]
She cannot make signs with her hands, but she can recognize signs. The word "recognizes" is important because it expresses that she can in fact use sign language, but only one way -- to receive communication, not to send it. Changing this to "knows" eliminates this information and makes this sentence contradict with the preceding one. It is now clear that "do sign language" in the preceding sentence also obscures this information; "do" is vague and hard to understand.
How many is "some"? "Some" could mean 3, or 30, or 300. Again Rebecca's explanation is lacking; this is described as "replacement of numbered items" but in fact it is just straight deletion of all numbers.
So, I would write:
[ Her hand shakes so she cannot speak in sign language. Her parents think she understands about 20 signs. ]
This is clear, easy to read, doesn't needlessly destroy information, and in my opinion is easier to read than Rebecca's simplification.
It's even worse, because "seeing" is often used metaphorically e.g. "She has trouble seeing his point" and "She has trouble seeing how she can find a job." "Eyesight" specifies that the seeing we're talking about has to do with eyes.
In terms of born premature vs born early, I understand that premature is the medical term. As a medical student, I also understand that it can be helpful to use more precise words in describing a situation.
However, I personally think that a lot of our medical jargon is due for simplification. For example, is there really any benefit to saying "epistaxis" rather than "bloody nose", or "rhinorrhea" rather than "runny nose"?
In the case of "born early" - premature and preterm are already interchangeable. I wouldn't mind adding born early to the mix.
As for "born early", I think it misses the actual problem. I think "born too early" is a closer-to-the-spirit simplification.
The more precise a term is, the more it expresses without added verbiage, but it’s also less likely to be widely understood.
Writing is hard; writing clearly - more understandably - is harder yet. Writing precisely, which would link some concepts of length/wordiness directly with understandability and clarity, is the hardest of all.
"If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter" - Blaise Pascal
If you don't have that knowledge retained it's a much larger leap to figure out what "premature" means. you have to understand the prefix (pre = before) and know what "mature" means in this context (not old, but rather "not ready").
This complicates the fact that premature birth also requires a lot of prior understanding (why can a baby be born too early? why is that a problem?)
Perhaps the author could have elaborated a little with plain language... "Born too soon" might be clearer.
The most important thing when writing is to know your audience. Given the goal the original ProPublica article (talking about how the the state of Arizona is not helping disabled children) the original paragraph is preferable because it succinctly and clearly communicates how serious Kyra’s problem is.
In the first sentence, “profoundly deaf” has a specific meaning and conveys the seriousness of the disability. Similarly, 27 weeks is a lot more helpful than “born early”. Many children are born before 40 weeks (early) and generally anything after 36 weeks (after the lungs have developed) is pretty uncomplicated. However, 27 weeks is very early and has a high complication rate and requires state of the art neonatal intensive care. In addition, 2 pounds is very small for a baby(average is around 7 pounds) and again requires a lot of high tech medical care just to survive until what would be full term.
In addition the words “tremor” combined with “impossible” conveys the severe medical nature of the problem more so than “shaking”. In addition, with the simple version, it is ambiguous whether using sign language is because of preference (self-conscious) or because it is impossible.
Again consider the goals of the original article. It is to point out the injustice that a child with a severe medical problem is not getting the care and help she requires and deserves. The original wording does a much better job of making this case.
The most important thing in writing is knowing your audience and your goal.
> If the one were greater or less than the others, or the others greater or less than the one, they would not be greater or less than each other in virtue of their being the one and the others; but, if in addition to their being what they are they had equality, they would be equal to one another, or if the one had smallness and the others greatness, or the one had greatness and the others smallness — whichever kind had greatness would be greater, and whichever had smallness would be smaller?
The words are easy, the vocabulary is small, the syllable count is low. Still you almost need to break it down and draw a chart to make sense of the sentence.
You might blame the old translation, I've read this material in more modern translations as well and it honestly doesn't get better.
> The missile knows where it is at all times. It knows this because it knows where it isn't. By subtracting where it is from where it isn't, or where it isn't from where it is (whichever is greater), it obtains a difference, or deviation. The guidance subsystem uses deviations to generate corrective commands to drive the missile from a position where it is to a position where it isn't, and arriving at a position where it wasn't, it now is. Consequently, the position where it is, is now the position that it wasn't, and it follows that the position that it was, is now the position that it isn't.
Very simple words, with 3 or 4 exceptions, but it short-circuits the brain a bit if you aren't following along carefully enough.
As an aside, I do contracting work for the Swedish public sector, and come in contact with an interesting conflict of needs. They have a mandate to use easy language, but also a need for specific legal terms. As a result, they've started overloading specific meanings on common words, making sentences appear understandable (the words are simple), but really easy to misunderstand (because half the words don't mean what you would think).
I'm not sure what's a good solution to this.
[https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parmenides]
SEW's up to almost 205,000 pages today. Besides the description on the front page, here's the SEW writing guide:
[https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:How_to_write_Sim...]
The best writing-style guide I've seen is Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. Master that and you'll be very proud of your prose!
This is plain, but is this good writing? Specifically, I find the writing lack of specifics. What is "early"? What is "very small"? What does "has trouble" mean? How bad is the shake? How do we quantify "some"?
Good writing is plain and simple. Being plain and simple does not mean bland or vague.
Specifics are only worthy when they are needed - that is, the core message changes without them, or the level of specificity is inefficient to convey it. This is not the case here.
>What is "early"?
Earlier than with a regular pregancy. For the intend it wants to convey (that she is autistic and deaf because of a premature pregnancy) that she was "early" is enough. If he said 6.5 months as opposed to 7 would it matter and change anything? It might even muddy the waters - if he wrote 7.6 months one might argue "hey, that's not too early" and start debating that, when the main thing this passage is intended to convey was that she was indeed born early.
>What is "very small"?
Much smaller than an average child, enough to be a result of early pregnacy and a factor for the aforementioned issues and other health concerns. Again, would exactly kilograms make any difference?
>What does "has trouble" mean?
That she doesn't see/hear/eat/and sleep as an average kid but worse. Would specifics ("she wakes every 1-2 hours" or "she can only hear under 9Khz") make any difference?
>Good writing is plain and simple. Being plain and simple does not mean bland or vague.
This is not supposed to be "good writing" whatever this means. This was intended to be "more readable" by a specific target audience.
I know others have pointed out that the article's point is about those with intellectual or learning disabilities, or learners of foreign languages, but I wonder if this really bears out. Literary Latin is full of (extremely) periodic sentences and once one has picked up on the general prosody and feel of this practice, those sentences aren't particularly hard to understand, even as a non-native reader.
[0]: https://archive.org/details/pdfy-2_qp8jQ61OI6NHwa/page/n27/m...
For you and me? No. As a translation for people with intellectual disabilities or people with minimal English skills that the article focuses on? Who knows; it's probably fine.
I just hope that such translations will remain translations and not replace the original.
Thanks for pointing it out. My bad. I missed this context. I thought the article was talking about good writing with plain English.
> Kyra has problems.
However, the article's intention is to use plain language to be accessible to individuals with intellectual disabilities or other difficulties in language (i.e. recent immigrants).
As a fairly well-read and educated person, I also find the "plain" version dull and uninspiring. However, I accept that the article is trying to make the point that such writing may be more broadly understandable.
For example, I recently had some relatives immigrate from a non-English speaking country. I helped them set up internet and noticed there were multiple points during the company's signup and payment process their lack of English fluency created huge hurdles.
I agree with some simplifications, e.g. "profoundly deaf" is essentially meaningless and bad style, it adds nothing over simply saying "deaf", but most other instances of paraphrased and simplified text miss something. Saying "a couple dozen" is natural language, this is how regular humans speak. What is gained by removing flavor and natural idioms from language?
To me, a lot of these simplifications sound like removing natural language and replacing it with something written by a robot, or where the target audience are children or non-native speakers. The text loses its flavor while aiming to be as simple to understand as possible; that's not a tradeoff I would choose in the majority of situations.
"Profoundly deaf" is not meaningless, nor is it bad style. It is in fact a medical diagnosis. Deafness exists on a continuum, and as deafness is measured "profoundly" is the most deaf you can be.
The included alternate plain writing sentence reads "Some kinds of writing are hard for everyone to read, like tax forms. But everyday writing, like the news, can be hard to read too." without any mention of "barrier".
Are you aware that the article is also written in the simpler style, as well? You can click on the paragraphs to toggle them.
[presses 'p']
This is an article. It has language. The language is 'rich'. 'Rich' language can be converted to 'plain' language. 'Rich' language has sentences. 'Plain' language has sentences too, but they are smaller. 'Plain' sentences usually look like "I do something", e.g. "George eats fruit". A 'rich' sentence can be split into 'smaller' sentences. 'Rich' sentences can be split into smaller 'plain' ones that look like "George eats fruit".
Hesitation. I am being honest. Do I fully agree, or not? I am not sure! More hesitation.
[unpresses 'p']
Hm ... I'm not sure if I fully agree or not to be honest...
The comments here seem to agree, but I'm not sure, either. I think there's merit to simplifying the structure like this, but, at the risk of projecting my own brain onto the population, these small "bullet point" sentences eliminate a lot of the _flow_ that I depend on to connect ideas together. Variety in the sentence structure, particularly length, keeps things novel enough that I don't get sucked into reading "automatically" (where I've technically read the words but digested none of them), and connecting words like because, moreover, thus, etc. give me clues about how the bullet points connect together. How one fact or statement follows from the previous.
The world is filled with detail, tailoring text to meet the needs of people unable to grasp that detail does not remove it - It obfuscates it.
Sometimes simple and direct language is good. Sometimes it makes the entire conversation devoid of usefulness or meaning.
Work to understand which context is appropriate for what you write.
Example(and opening myself up to criticism):
"Kyra is autistic and very deaf. She was born small and much earlier than she was supposed to. Because of this she has trouble seeing, hearing, eating and sleeping. Her hand shakes so much that she cannot use sign language to speak much at all. Her parents think she may know a couple of signs, but no more."
Some of these make writing better. Many of them just leave words out and don't say as much.
> The world is filled with detail, tailoring text to meet the needs of people unable to grasp that detail does not remove it - It obfuscates it.
There is a lot of stuff around us. Using words meant only for people who do not like a lot of stuff does not make the stuff go away. It just hides the stuff.
> Sometimes simple and direct language is good. Sometimes it makes the entire conversation devoid of usefulness or meaning.
Using simple words can be good. Sometimes it is not good enough.
> Work to understand which context is appropriate for what you write.
Use words understood by the people you are writing for.
Your first 3 re-writes all lose some of their meaning in the simplified form. The last one is basically fine.
They reminded me of Hemingway's simple, declarative style. I know some people like it, but I always found it somewhat lacking for creating a sense of emotional connection to the characters.
Not necessarily? If what you’re writing is intended for a completely general audience, or an audience that follows the distribution of an idealized general audience, maybe. And if the most important goal is understandability as well. But often writing is for purposes and audiences other than that. Taking it as axiomatic that the first and most important goal is comprehension by the widest possible audience suggests you should write at (at most) a fifth or sixth grade level. Anything above that and you’ve already failed at the “obvious best practice”.
(Disclaimer: Former Submission by me)
Consider the original quote:
> Let’s walk through how Rebecca, an expert in plain language, translates a text to be more readable. We'll use an excerpt from her translation of a ProPublica article by Amy Silverman in the following example.
and the plain version:
> Here is an example for how to make writing easier to read. Rebecca wrote this example. She is an expert in plain language. This quote is from a news article. Amy Silverman wrote it for ProPublica. Rebecca wrote it in plain language.
In the plain version, there are six separate statements for me to process and remember. In the non-plain version, only two. They convey all the same information, but the non-plain approach clusters relevant information. It's the difference between trying to remember the number 1945 (nineteen fourty-five) and 1-9-4-5 (one, nine, four, five). You can both process and remember the former better because the information is usefully clustered.
Furthermore, as a skilled reader, it's easier to filter the non-plain one down to what I care about: "Here is an example of a plain language expert rewriting a paragraph." I find the plain version more frustrating because each plain statement seems as important as any other. No syntax clues tell me if "Rebecca wrote this example" is something I can discard.
In closing, I think this is a great article even if I disagree with the premise that simple language is a best practice. I like the article because it makes me consider how I should change my writing based on the audience.
Fortunately, with the recent development of powerful natural language computer models, it is now possible to translate any writing into a simplified form using no more computing power than is available in any cell phone.
Therefore, I'd like to propose that "writing inclusively for the masses" is actually undesirable due to the inherent loss of information and style, and is unnecessary due to a rise of tech advances recently.
IMO, a better way to serve all readers is to write clearly and unambiguously in richer natural language. Then for those who desire simplification, the text can be translated into "plainspeak" as needed, using a tool tuned to perform that task, like Babelfish or Google Translate. I suspect a browser plugin also could do this for user-markedup blocks of text.
With that said, I'm confused about algorithm 2 (difficult words). How does adding "Yes!" in front of a sentence change it from a 0.45 reading level to a 0.25?
Am I missing something?? Was something else changed in that sentence?
I also think it's interesting that the article accurately pointed out that writers will censor themselves when writing for the intellectually challenged. And yet, I see examples of censorship in this very article (intentionally or not).
For example: "In recent decades, as disability activists have won more civil rights, both in the US and internationally, accessible writing has gained greater attention." vs "People with disabilities have more rights than ever before."
I feel like leaving out "civil" from rights could be construed as censorship. After all, what good is it to know you have rights if you don't even know what type of rights they are?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readabi...
There's also social register. More complex writing/speaking assumes knowledge of cultural markers which are intended to exclude those who aren't familiar with them. So writers/readers can use them as caste markers.
Simplification has to be a mix of as-simple-as-possible with as-neutral-as-possible.
I don't think the examples hit that, because they read as if they've been simplified, while successful simplification doesn't.
I like the info pages on the UK NHS site. They're as uncomplicated as they can be, they get the key facts across, but they're also very neutral.
Not just NHS, all of UK .gov online, leaflets and telephone services have adopted a super high standard of communication in recent years. Compared to the deliberately twisted legalese for tax, benefits, and services in the 1980s it's a huge transformation. Something has changed in the core culture.
I would have thought GPT-3 or similar could probably solve the reading level algorithm problem very easily. I thought that's where the article was going to be honest.
I agree the NHS pages are very clearly written.
- It conveys its information effectively.
- The controls for the translation are intuitive and aren't distracting.
- Its use of 3 levels of examples is convincing, makes for a rather complete view of the problem and makes the points easy to understand.
- It even links to high-quality resources to learn to write more accessibly in this style! [1][2][3]
I saw a lot of comments here about information being lost in the translation process.
I understand that this may not apply directly to how you write your technical documentation. However, I think you should note that this style of writing isn't meant for everyone everywhere. You probably won't ever see papers written in this style. Its main purpose seems to be in education and communications with broader audiences where accessibility is key.
Even then, its normal to lose some subtleties as you make writing simpler. The important part isn't to keep all the information in your text, it's to make the most important information accessible with as little friction as possible.
Practicing this also helps consider which information is relevant to the message you want to convey. When painting the picture of a complex character in a poetic way, you may want to keep the subtleties of language and use words that make the text flow even if it means increasing complexity. However, if you're writing to communicate crucial information or give instructions, which happens more often in our writing than we would like to admit, it's critical that the text is simple and accessible and contains only the most relevant information.
[1]: https://autisticadvocacy.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/One-...
[2]: https://www.plainlanguage.gov/
[3]: https://www.easy-read-online.co.uk/media/10609/making-myself...
"People with ID" means "people with identification" to me. My brain was thrown off by that phrase even in the plain version of the third and fourth paragraphs.
It seems that a sizable chunk of developers (and academics) who write struggle with the visual aspects of writing (and I'm not saying I do it amazingly). For example, developers love not to impose width restrictions on their personal blogs. But studies show that that makes text harder to read [0]. Some great writers like danluu.com are popular despite ignoring the visual aspects of readability. (And I don't mean to pick on Dan but it's a recent site I was looking at.)
My point is that it's easier to find ways to improve on your readability concerning words and phrasing. It's not as easy to find good tips on improving visual readability too.
I tried to write this comment in a "plain" style from the beginning. There are still a few items that I think could be improved. "for whom English..." might be one example.
You can't generally make two grammatically-correct English sentences by starting with one and swapping a comma for a full stop, and if you can find a case where you can, it probably doesn't preserve meaning, even in the approximate (losing distinctions of how tightly coupled ideas are) sense you can with a semicolon rather than a comma.
But, generally, yes there is considerable evidence that shorter, simpler sentences (even if the total work is similar length) are easier to read, at the expense of reducing the space of ideas that can be clearly expressed.
It also seems like that style of writing in particular probably doesn't help reading comprehension, even though shorter sentence in general do.
The fact that this article has been written twice (and defaults to the "less readable" version) implies there may be some reasons. Perhaps the only reason this was done here is to provide more contrasting examples?
Ultimately, I think the rules of readability here are mostly well-known (by writers) - Orwell famously codified similar rules in Politics & The English Language. But I think writers choose to ignore them for certain reasons & that seems worth exploring.
These strategies make writing less readable for the rest of us. The example paragraphs are clunky, and meaning gets lost.
To highlight this, consider making these same arguments about, say, music or art. And writing is indeed an art of sorts.
Another project that I know is this version of Wikipedia - https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
This is exactly why everything is so terrible, maximizing for breadth and losing everything that was worth sharing in the first place. If there are people with disabilities excluded you can help them, write specifically for them, don't start writing like everyone is disabled.
Also, I think there's just something enjoyable about being able to boil down a complex idea into pretty simple terms.
Short version: good writing is not about rules, it's about the function of the text, the readers, and what they value.
My best writing is my most concise.
Uncommon words are more “salt to taste” for me, everyone has a different palette.