Writing to Be Understood
Since early June, a professor from Carleton University and I have been designing and building software to help people write more clearly. Professor John Medicine Horse Kelly is a journalism professor who won a teaching award for a system of instruction he developed during his twenty years of teaching.
He is an interesting man, humble and soft-spoken. He is a natural listener, and he will listen to almost anything you have to say with a gentle and sympathetic smile. But, if you can stop talking and start listening, he will fill any silence you create with lovely stories about his grandfather, Peter Kelly, or Bill Reid, or any of his Haida relatives and friends. His soft-spokeness masks deep passions. One is teaching.
He has developed a system for teaching students to write well by identifying patterns that students can edit to improve their writing. I have written code that uses the natural language toolkit to read student’s assignments and to identify these patterns. Even I have learned to apply Dr. Kelly’s principles to create writing that is clear, lively and easy to understand. Here are things to watch for:
- If you use Microsoft Word, use the grammar and style tools to check the Flesch Kincaid grade level.
- Use the grammar and style tools to find and eliminate passive sentences.
- Ensure that your writing is composed of words that have an average of about 4.5 characters.
- Write paragraphs that have an average of about 2.5 to 3.5 sentences.
- Write sentences that have an average of between 12 and 15 words per sentences.
- Avoid using too many prepositions. Prepositions cause writing to become complex and hard to read.
I was able to improve this article by using our tool. The first draft of this blog entry read at the grade 10.5 level, and it contained several complexifiers. I was able to eliminate these words, and my writing improved. The draft you are now reading reads at a grade 8.6 level. As I use Dr. Kelly’s system, I see that it works.
Plain writing is important. People can find it hard to understand medical consent forms, legal documents, and privacy policies. Is it ethical to write important documents that ordinary people cannot understand? Is it smart?
In the next few weeks, I am going write about our tool. We call it WISE – Writing Instruction Software for Educators. Recently, we realized that we may have to call it Writing Instruction Software for Everyone. Who knows, if the code is easy to use, and if the principles can be easily explained, we may share the code with anybody who wants to try it. We have to get some legal advice first, but we hope to make a file available for download some time between now and Christmas.
If You Don’t Get It Yet . . .
For twenty years, the skill that I have depended on the most is my ability to navigate change. Change is an event. Change is something that happens to you – you either cope, or you get left behind.
I have met people who, at a young age, felt that they could learn everything they needed to know, and achieve some sort of enduring technical competence. They quickly learned that the cycle of learning and changing never ends.
This video makes a few things clear: change is massive, change is unrelenting, change is occurring on a fundamental level. Assumptions are changing. Keeping up with the technical aspects of change is hard enough, but understanding the effect and significance of it is mind bending. Let’s face it, the impact of the change is enough to knock some of us out of our orbits. I will let the video speak for itself:
How to Select a WordPress Theme
I am much better at design than some developers I have worked with, but I will never be great.
If I depended on my artistic flair to earn a living, I might be in trouble. Fortunately for me, there are cheap templates, and there are designs I can imitate.
Because I have been using it for years, I have found WordPress easy to start using it as a basic CMS for some of my clients.
My favourite place to buy a template is Themeforest. I host small sites for clients who do not have big budgets. Themeforest provides attractive templates at a very affordable price. However not all themes are equal. Here are some things you should consider.
1) Read the comments. Users often post comments about themes. They contain useful info. You do not want to buy a theme that has problems and issues, and you especially do not want to buy a theme from a designer who does not respond to that are raised problems.
2) Buy a well supported theme if you can. At ThemeForest, at least one designer has posted training screen casts.
3) If you are buying a theme for a client, buy cautiously. Themeforest displays the number of times a theme has been sold. I prefer themes by designers who have made number of sales. Also, I tend to choose themes by designers who have posted multiple themes that I can also check out.
4) Ensure that your theme is web standards compliant. There are tools you can use to check the template before you buy it. Read about this subject to learn more.
5) Use the theme preview and look at the CSS files. Do the CSS files contain useful comments? Can you figure out how the CSS corresponds to the pages you see? If you need to customize the template, you may have to work with these files. Don’t buy yourself grief. Buy templates the employ some CSS best practices.
6) And, finally, it never hurts to have a good book to help you alter the template, or to add functionality. I depend on Smashing WordPress, but there are others. And, of course, there is a lot of information available online.
7) Do not buy a template just for how it looks. Be smart. Buy something you can support and change with ease. Buy something that provides good functionality. Buy something that saves you and your clients headaches.