From ab0909e4c8e207b6e180b2c2b88ab991b47ba83a Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Akko Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2023 19:03:33 +0100 Subject: [PATCH] actually render html this time --- html/posts/expression/unusual_words.html | 4 ++++ 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+) diff --git a/html/posts/expression/unusual_words.html b/html/posts/expression/unusual_words.html index d254f3a..ec6c83e 100644 --- a/html/posts/expression/unusual_words.html +++ b/html/posts/expression/unusual_words.html @@ -221,6 +221,10 @@ Staying on the level of single words and turns of phrase, in practice what this

Often, this is not what you want. In scientific discourse, precision is highly valued, and so scientific writing has a house style of using carefully chosen, specific words. In normal everyday prose, however, this amounts to information overload. Even if the length of the text ends up the same, by choosing unexpected “pokey” words, you are preventing the reader from rounding your message off to their own everyday working set of concepts. In effect, you’re making your message less compressible for them. Try and do this sparingly! All of this is simply a special case of the commonsense principles of getting to the point and avoiding extraneous detail.

+ +

+I am fairly sure this is all supposed to be strongly related to the linguistic principle of markedness, but the wikipedia page on markedness is too technical for me to care enough about parsing and I get the impression that “markedness” is a broad multi-dimensional idea of which this post is a specific instance and my perspective on the topic is too superficial to point at the specific thing I am thinking of. +