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Comment by hintymad | Hacker News Reader

> Kyra is autistic and deaf. She was born early. She was very small when she was born. She has trouble seeing, hearing, eating and sleeping. Her hand shakes so she does not do sign language. Her parents think she knows some signs.

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.

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>This is plain, but is this good writing? Specifically, I find the writing lack of specifics.

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.

This particular passage reminds me of the anti-example in Strunk & White about "Avoid[ing] a Succession of Loose Sentences."[0]

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...

> This is plain, but is this good writing?

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.

> As a translation for people with intellectual disabilities or people with minimal English skills that the article focuses on

Thanks for pointing it out. My bad. I missed this context. I thought the article was talking about good writing with plain English.

I agree. There's a big difference between simplifying writing and just omitting all the details. The example translation is almost all detail-omitting and very little simplification. How much detail is appropriate depends on your audience; it's not a clear win to just omit all details. Otherwise I can simplify their example even more:

> Kyra has problems.

Agreed. I think it's not good writing. It also doesn't sound natural, it sounds like something written by a robot...

I think a fundamental mistake you (and other commenters on this article) are making is judging the value of the "plain" English version by whether you think it's good writing.

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.

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