The Rise and Fall of Convoluted Syntax

[lpetrich]

Originally from Secular Cafe and rewritten a bit.

The Rise and Fall of the English Sentence - Nautilus | Science Connected

Author Julie Sedivy parses into clauses the first sentence of the US Declaration of Independence.

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people [to dissolve the political bands [which have connected them with another]] and [to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station [to which the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them]]], a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires [that they should declare the causes [which impel them to the separation.

I'll show this parsing as an indented list:

• When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people
  • to dissolve the political bands
    • which have connected them with another
• and
  • to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station
    • to which the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them,
• a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires
  • that they should declare the causes
    • which impel them to the separation.

She continues:

An iconic sentence, this. But how did it ever make its way into the world? At 71 words, it is composed of eight separate clauses, each anchored by its own verb, nested within one another in various arrangements. The main clause (a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires ) hangs suspended above a 50-word subordinate clause that must first be unfurled. Like an intricate equation, the sentence exudes a mathematical sophistication, turning its face toward infinitude.

Noam Chomsky has pointed to such recursive clause combination as a hallmark of human language. However, speakers of many languages prefer to string together simple clauses, and they may lack multiclause features like relative pronouns (which, that) and clause connectors (if, despite, although).

Many of the worlds oral languages are quite unlike European languages. Their sentences contain few words. They rarely combine more than one clause. Linguist Marianne Mithun has noted some striking differences: In English, 34 percent of clauses in conversational American English are embedded clauses. In Mohawk (spoken in Quebec), only 7 percent are. Gunwinggu (an Australian language) has 6 percent and Kathlamet (formerly spoken in Washington state) has only 2 percent.

So how might the first sentence in the US DoI go with such syntax? JS doesn't try, but I will try. I also modernized some of the language.

In the course of human events, it is sometimes necessary to do very big things. Things like cutting the political bonds that tie one people to another. Also giving oneself a separate and equal position among the nations of the Earth. A position that the laws of Nature and Nature's God entitle them to have. A decent respect for the opinions of humanity requires them to state their reasons for making this change.

 

[rjh01]

My rewrite in modern language.

When one nation declares independence from another that nation should declare the causes which compel them to this act. This is to show respect to everyone.

Everything else is unnecessary.

 

[lpetrich]

Back to the article, JS noted that some New-World languages have borrowed clause-connector words from European languages, sometimes a lot of them. Their speakers have also invented such words, like for "and".

According to linguist Guy Deutscher, the earliest clay tablets (about 2500 B.C.) of the ancient language Akkadian reveal few embedded clauses. The same is evidently true of the earliest stages of other ancient written languages such as Sumerian, Hittite, or Greek.

quotes this text from Hittite in 14th cy. BCE (Mursili's aphasia):

I drove in a chariot to Kunnu, and a thunderstorm came, then the Storm-God kept thundering terribly, and I feared, and the speech in my mouth became small, and the speech came up a little bit, and I forgot this matter completely, but afterwards the years came and went, and this matter came to appear repeatedly in my dreams, and God's hand seized me in my dreams, and then, my mouth went sideways, and ...

Justus_Syntactic-structures-in-Mursilis-Aphasia.pdf

But when writing has done for a long time, we start getting multiclause texts like these (Hammurabi's law code, 18th cy. BCE):

[If, [after the sheep and goats come up from the common irrigated area [when the pennants announcing the termination of pasturing are wound around the main city gate], the shepherd releases the sheep and goats into a field], the shepherd shall guard the field].

• If,
  • after the sheep and goats come up from the common irrigated area
    • when the pennants announcing the termination of pasturing are wound around the main city gate,
  • the shepherd releases the sheep and goats into a field,
• the shepherd shall guard the field.

Similar things have happened much more recently, like in Finnish and in Somali.

Why does this happen? Julie Sedivy thinks that the difference is in how the language is consumed, for lack of a better word. Readers can do things that listeners cannot easily do, like go back and reread something. So they can more easily interpret complicated syntax.

Furthermore, one can improve by practice. The more one does of it, the better one can do. But one does need practice in doing so. If one does not get such practice, one will have difficulty doing so.

Over the last few centuries, however, this trend has been reversed.

In fact, heavily recursive sentences like those found in the Declaration of Independence have already been dwindling in written English (as well as in German) for some time. According to texts analyzed by Brock Haussamen, the average sentence length in written English has shrunk since the 17th century from between 40-70 words to a more modest 20, with a significant paring down of the number of subordinate and relative clauses, passive sentences, explicit connectors between clauses, and off-the-beaten-path sentence structures.

She suspects that this is a side effect of literacy becoming more widespread. This means that people with less interest in written language have to use it, and that means simplifying syntactic complexity for them.

Oral languages may avoid pushing the limits of syntax not just because they are bound to speech, but also because they have other ways to express complex meanings. Linguists take great pains to point out that languages with simple sentences erupt with complexity elsewhere: They typically pack many particles of meaning into a single word. For example, the Mohawk word sahonwanhotónkwahse conveys as much meaning as the English sentence "She opened the door for him again." In English, you need two clauses (one embedded inside the other) to say "He says she's leaving," but in Yup'ik, a language spoken in Alaska, you can use a single word, Ayagnia. (Ayagniuq, in contrast, means "He says he himself is leaving"; Ayagtuq means, more simply, "He's leaving.")

I can recognize an evidential affix there: -ni- for hearsay.

That aside, I suspect that with increasing use of writing comes greater use of writing for utilitarian purposes, like memos and reports, with less motive to show off one's writing skills.

 

[lpetrich]

A curious leader of this trend is specialized scientific communities.

Evidence shows that the most insular scientific communities have led the march away from elaborated sentences in favor of complex, compressed nouns: Science articles in specialist publications such as the Journal of Cell Biology contain fewer relative clauses and more noun compounds than articles in publications like Science, which target a more diverse community of scientists. Both of these samples in turn have less syntactic elaboration and more compression than academic writing in the humanities, which presupposes even less specialized knowledge among its readers. And lagging behind all of these in the trend toward noun-heavy compression is the language of novels and plays. And, as Biber and Gray have shown, university students learn the art of compression gradually, with those in the sciences coming to rely less on multiple clauses and more on complex nouns than their peers in the arts and humanities.

But those complex words have a purpose. They are a convenient shorthand, and it is usually easy to find out what they mean.

Also, such technical prose is essentially utilitarian, not artistic. Convoluted syntax can get in the way of readability, so that's another reason to avoid it.

 

[steve_bank]

On the flip side trying to make all communication in science 'understandable' would be burdensome. It is what science writers and reporters do. Make convoluted science comprehensible to the non scientific.

The most compact expressions in science are equations.

If I started speaking calculus to describe something to a non mathematical person it would sound convoluted and arcane.

The divergence of a volume in a water sustem is positive if the volume is a source.

Corporate cultures develop their own syntax related to the business. Unless you are in it it can be incomprehensible.

 

[Swammerdami]

(I clicked Like. lpetrich has posted some VERY interesting articles on linguistics recently.)

Just for fun, I scanned a few recent books (but only the very few I happen to already have in machine-readable form) to see how many clauses they packed into a sentence. The comparisons may be unfair for several reasons. (In his Origin of Species Darwin makes extensive use of dashes and semicolons and therefore has "sentences" with huge numbers of clauses.) But even without counting gerund or infinitive clauses, the DoI's 8-clause sentence is often tied or surpassed.

Here's a 22-clause sentence from a writer who has drawn praise like "No author has crafted tension on the page as masterfully as Hall." I've added line-breaks to separate the clauses. (The ninth clause ends with a comma where most would use a full stop, but that would still leave a 13-clause sentence.)

In most missions there's a flashpoint:
it's
when the executive is to perform a distinctly hazardous operation,
to break into, for instance, the official intelligence headquarters of an unfriendly host country
and try to get out again with something so classified
that all the windows would blow out
if anyone knew,
or to get a wanted subject away from a fully-armed mantrap outside Hong Kong Airport with the public and the police looking on,
or to make a last-ditch break for the frontier ahead of a pack of war-trained Doberman Pinschers, that sort of thing,
flashpoint is
what it says
and the one that was coming up for Solitaire would be in two hours' time at the airport at Dar-el-Beida,
when the man from London stopped his car
and got out
and came over to the black Mercedes 560 SEL
we were sitting in
and the counter-terrorist units closed in for the snatch with their floodlights and assault rifles
and the shooting started
and the executive for the mission went down first
because those would be the orders from Dieter Klaus, the prearranged orders,
the ones he would give
before he left here this evening on his way to Midnight One.

Here's a rather routine 10-clause sentence:

Fischer knew
that Lobsang was short-roping Pittman,
yet did nothing to stop it;
some people have thus concluded
that Fischer ordered Lobsang to do it,
because Pittman had been moving slowly
when she started out on summit day,
and Fischer worried
that if Pittman failed to reach the summit,
he would be denied a marketing bonanza.

Here's a 12-clause sentence from a tribute to one of America's very greatest heroes:

When, for instance, he saw a knot of the ruffians on the prairie, discussing, of course, the single topic
which then occupied their minds,
he would, perhaps, take his compass and one of his sons,
and proceed to run an imaginary line right through the very spot
on which that conclave had assembled,
and when he came up to them,
he would naturally pause
and have some talk with them, learning their news, and, at last, all their plans perfectly;
and having thus completed his real survey
he would resume his imaginary one,
and run on his line
till he was out of sight.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

By the way, aren't there structural differences that make some comparisons difficult? I previously showed a 13-word Thai sentence with 12 verbs! Some of those single word verbs could be treated as clauses.

TWELVE consecutive verbs in a 13-word sentence!
. . . 'He intend walk go arrange seek buy come collect keep use give amuse'
. . . /khao tang-jai deuen pai chat haa seu maa gep wai chai hai sanuk/

 

[skepticalbip]

Reportedly, Lucy Ellmann wrote a book, Ducks, Newburyport, that has one sentence that is 426,100 words in length.

 

[lpetrich]

What makes some complex sentences easy to parse and others not? They become hard to parse if one has to jump back and forth between clauses: like (part of main clause) (subordinate clause) (part of main clause), instead of (complete main clause) (subordinate clause) or (subordinate clause) (main clause)

These are easy:
When I got up, I visited IIDB. -- sub, main
I visited IIDB when I got up. -- main, sub

But this is not:
I, when I got up, visited IIDB. -- main 1, sub, main 2

Writing Style and Language Complexity | Precise Edit's Blog

Easy:
Lisa bought a red car.

Medium:
When the day ended, Lisa, a sales clerk at the downtown market, bought a red car.

Hard:
When the day ended, which couldn’t have happened soon enough, given the type of day she had had, Lisa, a sales clerk at the downtown market, a grimy, dark nook in an old building, bought what she mistakenly thought was a new, or, at the worst, slightly used, red car.

So if one has to jump back and forth in one's parsing, that causes trouble. That's the trouble with the first sentence in the DoI. It's very jumpy.

Swammerdami's example isn't jumpy, but a sort of chain of subordination: (main) (sub) (sub of sub) ... That makes it easier to parse than what one might expect.

 

[Jarhyn]

Originally from Secular Cafe and rewritten a bit.

The Rise and Fall of the English Sentence - Nautilus | Science Connected

Author Julie Sedivy parses into clauses the first sentence of the US Declaration of Independence.

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people [to dissolve the political bands [which have connected them with another]] and [to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station [to which the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them]]], a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires [that they should declare the causes [which impel them to the separation.

I'll show this parsing as an indented list:

• When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people
  • to dissolve the political bands
    • which have connected them with another
• and
  • to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station
    • to which the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them,
• a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires
  • that they should declare the causes
    • which impel them to the separation.

She continues:

An iconic sentence, this. But how did it ever make its way into the world? At 71 words, it is composed of eight separate clauses, each anchored by its own verb, nested within one another in various arrangements. The main clause (a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires ) hangs suspended above a 50-word subordinate clause that must first be unfurled. Like an intricate equation, the sentence exudes a mathematical sophistication, turning its face toward infinitude.

Noam Chomsky has pointed to such recursive clause combination as a hallmark of human language. However, speakers of many languages prefer to string together simple clauses, and they may lack multiclause features like relative pronouns (which, that) and clause connectors (if, despite, although).

Many of the worlds oral languages are quite unlike European languages. Their sentences contain few words. They rarely combine more than one clause. Linguist Marianne Mithun has noted some striking differences: In English, 34 percent of clauses in conversational American English are embedded clauses. In Mohawk (spoken in Quebec), only 7 percent are. Gunwinggu (an Australian language) has 6 percent and Kathlamet (formerly spoken in Washington state) has only 2 percent.

So how might the first sentence in the US DoI go with such syntax? JS doesn't try, but I will try. I also modernized some of the language.

In the course of human events, it is sometimes necessary to do very big things. Things like cutting the political bonds that tie one people to another. Also giving oneself a separate and equal position among the nations of the Earth. A position that the laws of Nature and Nature's God entitle them to have. A decent respect for the opinions of humanity requires them to state their reasons for making this change.

In the course of events it is sometimes necessary to do big things. Some of the big things it is necessary to do are to cut political bonds that tie cultures together. Another thing is to set oneself equal to other nations and powers of the earth. To be equal among the powers of the earth is something that the laws of nature entitle us to. A decent respect for others requires to state our reasons for declaring the entitlement to equality.

 

[lpetrich]

Looking at Precise Edit's examples, the problem with the hard case's examples is that it has a *lot* of digressions, and that's what makes it difficult to follow -- our short-term memory tends to get overloaded.

Easy:
Lisa bought a red car.

A single clause.

Medium:
When the day ended, Lisa, a sales clerk at the downtown market, bought a red car.

The subordinate clause is no problem, because it is outside the main clause. But the main clause contains a sizable apposition: "Lisa" with "a sales clerk at the downtown market", and that causes trouble. To avoid breaking up clauses, one can try

When the day ended, Lisa bought a red car. She is a sales clerk at the downtown market.

Hard:
When the day ended, which couldn’t have happened soon enough, given the type of day she had had, Lisa, a sales clerk at the downtown market, a grimy, dark nook in an old building, bought what she mistakenly thought was a new, or, at the worst, slightly used, red car.

Oodles of subordinate clauses and appositions, making lots of digressions. I'll straighten it out.

When the day ended, Lisa bought a red car. The day's ending couldn’t have happened soon enough, given the type of day she had had. She is a sales clerk at the downtown market, a grimy, dark nook in an old building. She mistakenly thought that the car was a new one, or, at the worst, a slightly used one.

 

[Elixir]

It was the end of the day when Lisa left the downtown market where she worked as a sales clerk. Leaving the grimy, dark nook behind, she headed to the car dealership. A red car caught her attention, but even though it was slightly used, it was much too expensive for her meager sales clerk budget.
Lisa took the bus home. It took the rest of the day for the police to find it.

 

[lpetrich]

A feature of a lot of technical language is compound words, sometimes large ones. German is legendary for its compound words, but English also has many compound words, and many compound words in the guise of attributive phrases.

Consider English - German:
Rattlesnake - Klapperschlange
Water snake - Wasserschlange
Though English sometimes has a compound: watersnake. The English and German words are word-for-word translations of each other's component words.

The other Germanic languages on "A rattlesnake and a water snake are in my yard." (Google Translate):
Frisian: In rattelslang en in wetterslang binne yn myn hôf.
Dutch: Een ratelslang en een waterslang zijn in mijn tuin.
German: Eine Klapperschlange und eine Wasserschlange sind in meinem Garten.
Danish: En klapperslange og en vandslange er i min have.
Norwegian: En klapperslange og en vannslange er i hagen min.
Swedish: En skallerorm och en vattenorm finns på min trädgård.
Icelandic: Skröltormur og vatnssnákur eru í garðinum mínum.

All the words for the two kinds of snake are compounds in all the languages.

The Romance languages:
French: Un serpent à sonnette et un serpent d'eau sont dans mon jardin.
Catalan: Al meu pati hi ha una serp de cascavell i una serp d'aigua.
Spanish: Una serpiente de cascabel y una serpiente de agua están en mi jardín.
Portuguese: Uma cascavel e uma cobra d'água estão no meu quintal.
Italian: Nel mio giardino ci sono un serpente a sonagli e un serpente d'acqua.
Romanian: Un șarpe cu clopoței și un șarpe de apă sunt în curtea mea.

Some of the Romance ones reverse the overall order: "In my yard are a rattlesnake and a water snake". Instead of compounds, the Romance languages use phrases that are literally "snake with rattle" and "snake of water". The Portuguese word for rattlesnake looks like only a word for rattle, like English 'rattler".

I looked at the Slavic ones, and the only one I found with a compound word for rattlesnake was Russian:
У меня во дворе гремучая змея и водяная змея.
U menya vo dvore gremuchaya zmeya i vodyanaya zmeya.
The words are "rattle(adj) snake" and "water(adj) snake" with adjective-forming suffixes.

Polish: Grzechotnik i wąż wodny są na moim podwórku.
The Polish word for rattle is grzechotka, making the snake "rattler". For water snake, the order was reversed: "snake water(adj)"

Croatian: Zvečarka i vodena zmija su u mom dvorištu.
The Croatian word for rattle is zvečka, making rattlesnake "rattler". But water snake is "water(adj) snake" (same order).

Scots Gaelic: Tha nathair-ghritheach agus nathair uisge anns a’ ghàrradh agam.
Welsh: Mae neidr grifft a neidr ddŵr yn fy iard.
The parts of the compounds are in reverse order: "snake rattle" and "snake water".

Finnish: Pihallani on kalkkarokäärme ja vesikäärme.
Hungarian: Egy csörgőkígyó és egy vízikígyó van az udvaromban.
Both snake words are compounds, and "in my yard" is in front in Finnish, and in back in Hungarian.

Turkish: Bahçemde bir çıngıraklı yılan ve bir su yılanı var.
Split compounds, like English "water snake".

Japanese: ガラガラヘビとミズベヘビが私の庭にいます。
Garagarahebi to mizubehebi ga watashi no niwa ni imasu.
Compounds.

Etc. Looking in many other languages, I could often recognize "water snake", though I cheated by having Google give me words for "rattle" and "water" and "snake" separately. "Rattlesnake" was more difficult, and many words look like "rattler", with some words clearly borrowed from English.

 

[pood]

Originally from Secular Cafe and rewritten a bit.

The Rise and Fall of the English Sentence - Nautilus | Science Connected

Author Julie Sedivy parses into clauses the first sentence of the US Declaration of Independence.

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people [to dissolve the political bands [which have connected them with another]] and [to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station [to which the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them]]], a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires [that they should declare the causes [which impel them to the separation.

I'll show this parsing as an indented list:

• When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people
  • to dissolve the political bands
    • which have connected them with another
• and
  • to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station
    • to which the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them,
• a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires
  • that they should declare the causes
    • which impel them to the separation.

She continues:

An iconic sentence, this. But how did it ever make its way into the world? At 71 words, it is composed of eight separate clauses, each anchored by its own verb, nested within one another in various arrangements. The main clause (a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires ) hangs suspended above a 50-word subordinate clause that must first be unfurled. Like an intricate equation, the sentence exudes a mathematical sophistication, turning its face toward infinitude.

Noam Chomsky has pointed to such recursive clause combination as a hallmark of human language. However, speakers of many languages prefer to string together simple clauses, and they may lack multiclause features like relative pronouns (which, that) and clause connectors (if, despite, although).

Many of the worlds oral languages are quite unlike European languages. Their sentences contain few words. They rarely combine more than one clause. Linguist Marianne Mithun has noted some striking differences: In English, 34 percent of clauses in conversational American English are embedded clauses. In Mohawk (spoken in Quebec), only 7 percent are. Gunwinggu (an Australian language) has 6 percent and Kathlamet (formerly spoken in Washington state) has only 2 percent.

So how might the first sentence in the US DoI go with such syntax? JS doesn't try, but I will try. I also modernized some of the language.

In the course of human events, it is sometimes necessary to do very big things. Things like cutting the political bonds that tie one people to another. Also giving oneself a separate and equal position among the nations of the Earth. A position that the laws of Nature and Nature's God entitle them to have. A decent respect for the opinions of humanity requires them to state their reasons for making this change.

You believe this is better than the original?

IMO, the original is poetry. It is gold, as is the opening of the second paragraph, which Lincoln would turn to such advantage decades later. The opening lines of the Declaration are soul-stirring, even if they were written by a rotten slaveholder. Such are the little ironies of history. These people complaining about subordinate clauses and such would turn the Gettysburg Address into a rental contract the Shakespeare into kindergarten prose.

 

[pood]

My rewrite in modern language.

When one nation declares independence from another that nation should declare the causes which compel them to this act. This is to show respect to everyone.

Everything else is unnecessary.

LOL, Okie-doke!

 

[pood]

There is a difference between writing the fewest possible words to get an idea across, and using language to stir the soul.

 

[lpetrich]

More on German compound words:

• German Compound Nouns Explained and Simplified - Lingoda
• Compound Words (Komposita)

Some German compound words have impressive length.

Centuries ago, Asian Indian grammarians had classified compounds ( Sanskrit compound):

• tatpurusha - determiner or endocentric compounds, like English "rattlesnake" and "water snake"
• bahuvrihi - exocentric compounds, that name meaning "much rice" for a rich person, like English "moneybags"
• dvandva - coordinate compounds, like English "open-and-shut"

Are there any languages that don't have compounds?

 Greenlandic language - "There are few compound words but many derivations."

 

[Copernicus]

Bear in mind that the issue isn't really short term memory with these long clauses. You are looking at them as if they were single-sentence discourses. Unless we are generative linguists arguing over the acceptability of syntactic structure, sentences do not exist outside of discourse-situated contexts. People don't just randomly generate sentences and then figure out what they mean. They construct sentences in which the elements have significance for the topic of discourse. So you need to start thinking about why subordinate clauses--relative clauses and complement clauses--even exist in all the human languages. What is their communicative function? A restrictive relative clause helps the listener to identify a discourse referent. If it is a long relative clause, then there needs to be a reason for the speaker to expend the effort to construct it. A nonrestrictive relative clause interpolates additional information about a know referent, which is why their head NPs almost always contain definite reference. If the speaker finds it necessary to construct a very long nonrestrictive relative clause, then the better option is usually to add it as a separate sentence.

In human communication, speakers have two conflicting goals--to say enough to convey a thought and keep the language as simple as comprehensible as possible. So they add structures like relative clauses to fill in details and reduce structure to economize effort and make it easier for the listener to follow the train of thought. When you talk about very lengthy recursive structures, you are implicitly relying on the plausibility of a need to put all of that structure into play right away rather than to string it out in more digestible packets. Languages have iterative and recursive structure as a means of adding necessary or desirable complexity to the linguistic structure. But they also have operations that compact and reduce structure. That is a very important design feature in linguistic behavior--the ability to increase or reduce the structure of linguistic expressions.

 

[bilby]

Convoluted language is a part of a wider fashion for elaborate decoration. It's a symbol of wealth, education, and class, and above all of scarcity, and makes an excellent marker of these things, as it is profligate with resources - time, money, and learning - that are unavailable to the common man.

When the ability to do something (and writing is no exception) is hard won, the ability to not only do it, but to do it the hard way, with style and panache, is an acceptable way to show off without seeming vulgar.

Once that skill is widely available to the common people, there's a tendency towards utilitarian and simple forms, that get the job done (perhaps even better than the artistic and complex forms so prized in earlier times), and away from decoration and embellishments that show the wealth and status of the person who commands that skill.

This can be seen clearly by making a comparison between non-linguistic products of the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries.

 

[Copernicus]

Convoluted language is a part of a wider fashion for elaborate decoration. It's a symbol of wealth, education, and class, and above all of scarcity, and makes an excellent marker of these things, as it is profligate with resources - time, money, and learning - that are unavailable to the common man.

I had no end of trouble with this tendency in Boeing's engineering community. Engineers spend about half their time writing descriptions, assembly/disassembly instructions, and operational procedures. Our school system tends to teach expository writing, which might make sense in writing essays and formal letters, but it doesn't help a lot in technical language. So you get a lot of fancy technical descriptions in manuals that could be written far more simply and clearly. The worst problem in a technical community is not just with convoluted ways to describe simple instructions, but the use of jargon to signal technical competence to the reader. The problem with that in the airplane industry and others with an international manufacturing and sales chain is that many of the readers can be technically competent but still struggle with English. And writers don't often realize that jargon may not extend to workplaces outside of the company or shop that develops it. I often found it quite difficult to make that point with engineers, some of whom would invariably argue that it was up to suppliers and customers to learn "proper English". I kept having to make the point that communication failures could cause loss of money, equipment, and lives, sometimes quite catastrophically.

 

[steve_bank]

Convoluted language is a part of a wider fashion for elaborate decoration. It's a symbol of wealth, education, and class, and above all of scarcity, and makes an excellent marker of these things, as it is profligate with resources - time, money, and learning - that are unavailable to the common man.

I had no end of trouble with this tendency in Boeing's engineering community. Engineers spend about half their time writing descriptions, assembly/disassembly instructions, and operational procedures. Our school system tends to teach expository writing, which might make sense in writing essays and formal letters, but it doesn't help a lot in technical language. So you get a lot of fancy technical descriptions in manuals that could be written far more simply and clearly. The worst problem in a technical community is not just with convoluted ways to describe simple instructions, but the use of jargon to signal technical competence to the reader. The problem with that in the airplane industry and others with an international manufacturing and sales chain is that many of the readers can be technically competent but still struggle with English. And writers don't often realize that jargon may not extend to workplaces outside of the company or shop that develops it. I often found it quite difficult to make that point with engineers, some of whom would invariably argue that it was up to suppliers and customers to learn "proper English". I kept having to make the point that communication failures could cause loss of money, equipment, and lives, sometimes quite catastrophically.

Not quite true.

It depnds on the kind of engineer you are.

There are technical writing specialists that in the Seattle area work as contractors for aerospace companies. They ususally come in at the end of a project.

I have been a design, test, and manufacturing engineer. Wring documentation for complex problems and procedures is far more difficult than you might think. It can become impossible to put it into an obvious and linear step by step structure. At some point you have to rely on the experience and knowledge of the reader to understand it.

The same with writing specifications. There can be interlocking continginciess and dependent conditions that make a linear easy to follow structure. Again it reacquires experience to understand. It becomes a convoluted exercise in formal logic.

I worked o Boeing programs at a company, and had to trasnlate specs into a design.

As with all things, there are bad technical writers. There are engineers who intentionally make straight issues seem complicated. Probaly the same in any profession.

There are threads on math theory on the forum. I have a background in applied math. Not having any background in areas like set theory and other theoretical math the threads are convoluted and arcane to me. To a mathemician it wuld seem clear and straightforward.


There is aslo culture in a community. A way of doing things takes hold and people copy it. Thacan include technical and science writing.