Date: Thu, 30 Nov 1995 23:26:53 +0200 (EET)
From: Jukka Laari <jlaari-AT-kanto.cc.jyu.fi>
Subject: Language problems


Louis, 

thanks for taking up one serious and important issue. I mean that 
language problem which lurks on every list where there are people from 
various countries around the world. 

What do you think, should I go and take a course in bussinessy writing? 
Will I (after that) be able to communicate with Salomon Bros. and 
Microsoft in a way that I'll get a job in some Manhattan bank or broker 
company? 

Seriously: 

It's pretty double-edged sword to trust these business wisdoms. On the 
one hand, there surely is something to that ideology of readability - at 
least in an 'effective' business world. On the other hand, it is an 
ideology. It is aimed to restrict, manipulate, and channel human 
communication. Will you burn the books by James Joyce and Thomas Mann 
just because they didn't knew (or didn't care) Solomon Bros. rules? 
Hell, according the same rule you must burn Das Kapital, too. (Now I 
understand that weird ideology of 'analytical marxism'...) 

Let's face it. Culture and language are somehow intimately connected. 
Languages differ according their grammatical & other linguistic rules. 
Some languages afford quite free or loose placing of words in sentence. 
Some others are more restricted. Some languages are very tough when 
grammatical errors are considered; 'natural speakers', those who speak it 
as 'mother-tongue', can't sometimes understand (at least so they say!) a 
sentence if there's a grammatical error in it - for example Swedish. 
Some others are more loose in that sense; nearly twenty years ago one 
German told that he learned his native German very lately, namely couple 
of months before he arrived to Finland to teach German here. According 
to his testimony German people aren't particularly sensitive to all 
those funny rules of their language. Accordingly (? - I'm not sure if 
these questions are related so strongly as I seem to imply) Swedish seems 
to recommend quite snappy use of language, but German allows long complex 
sentences with several subordinate sentences (style of Thomas Mann and 
Karl Marx, for example, and Sigmund Freud, too, who even won one 
literature prize). 

And English then? It seems to be officially less loose in several ways. 
Despite the fact that people do use it in several ways. But am I totally 
wrong if I suppose that in 19th century English was spoken and written 
much loosely than today? I mean: that Solomon Bros. kind of set of rules 
in your Microsoft grammar-checker seem to be quite recent innovation. But 
who has created it? Why? Because I'm not a linguist nor philologist I 
cannot tell what all nasty strategies there are behind these rules, but I 
dare to suppose that all this rule-gaming isn't just disinterested 
creation of some humanitarian lovers of High Style. I'm afraid that 
proper use of some language isn't totally intrinsic to that language but 
is quite extensively defined by culture, by cultural rules & norms 
related to that language. - Perhaps our friends at English and 
Literature departments could enlighten us a bit? 

Honestly, man, do you really believe what you're writing? 

Besides, you could use the time, you're using your grammar-checker, for 
reading some complex sentence twice, perhaps even three times? 


Yours, Jukka Laari 

On Thu, 30 Nov 1995, Louis N Proyect wrote:

"It is the "Gunning fog factor" that is the problem. The Gunning fog 
factor was something I learned it about in a business writing workshop 
at Salomon Bros. in 1975. It involves factors such as length of 
sentence, number of sentences in paragraph, number of multisyllabic 
words, passive voice occurrence, etc. You keep track of each occurrence 
and come up with a weighted score. If you get something like a 30, you 
are borderline readable. If you get a 20, you are in good shape. I ran 
Juan's piece on Peronism through my Microsoft grammar-checker (which 
performs readability testing) and he got a 645." 


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