Steven Jong

Every editor and style guide I’ve ever worked with has warned me to avoid using Latinates (such as “e.g.”) in technical writing. Several reasons are given, including that today’s readers may well not know what they mean. Better is plain-spoken English, in which an equivalent team can always be found. I didn’t bemoan the general decline of literacy; I just did as I was instructed. I can’t say I’ve ever regretted doing so.

I was interested to see this recent article on the BBC News Web site about British town councils making the same decision:

A number of local councils in Britain have banned their staff from using Latin words, because they say they might confuse people.

Several local authorities have ruled that phrases like “vice versa”, “pro rata”, and even “via” should not be used, in speech or in writing.

But the ban has prompted anger among some Latin scholars.

Professor Mary Beard of Cambridge University said it was the linguistic equivalent of ethnic cleansing.

Some local councils say using Latin is elitist and discriminatory, because some people might not understand it – particularly if English is not their first language.

Bournemouth Council is among those which have discouraged Latin. It has drawn up a list of 18 Latin phrases which its staff are advised not to use, either verbally or in official correspondence.

That sounds reasonable to me, and it doesn’t hinder my technical writing style. By the way, for more information about the Plain English Campaign, click here.

[Originally posted 1/2/2009 in the previous version of my blog–sfj]

A study by the University of Oxford has identified a genetic link to poor reading skills:

A common genetic variant may be partly to blame for poor reading ability, research suggests.

The variant, carried by more than one in seven people, has already been associated with dyslexia.
Tests by the University of Oxford found people carrying the key sequence tended to perform worse than average in tests of their reading ability.
But the study, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, found no impact on general intelligence.

We care about the reading skills of our audience, and are often counseled to write at the eighth-grade level as measured by readability indexes. But it may be that a significant portion of our audience will still struggle to read what we write.

I suggest that we keep in mind that there’s more than one way to communicate, and more than one channel to do it. If you can get your point across with an illustration, do it! I don’t mean instead of text, but in addition to text.