(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
This isn’t a criticism, but one has to be careful to avoid becoming too general by using a slightly inappropriate everyday “equivalent” (which is the point of scientific/jargon words), especially with some of the material on this site.
Maybe that list wasn’t intended for scientific writing, but for popular writing. In science writing, you’re right, of course. Still, remember the table from this recent post, with examples of words which mean one thing to scientists and another to ordinary people.
Here’s C.S. Lewis in 1964 (page down to “for whom are we to cater”) talking about finding out that people from different social groups understand the same words differently.
Twice as Less is a book about students who speak Black English Vernacular having trouble with science and math because of linguistic differences—“Orr pinpoints misunderstandings that beset students whose first language is nonstandard English. Her belief that BEV is rule-governed and not merely “bad” English is supported by data from her students who, for example, confuse “twice” and “half” or combine “as” and “than” in their partitive comparisons.”
A reader review points out that some white students have the same problems.
This is an area where a lot of empirical research would be valuable, but I haven’t heard of anyone doing it. I haven’t even heard of advertisers doing it, but perhaps they don’t make their research public.
A reader review points out that some white students have the same problems
Anecdotal evidence here: From teaching and tutoring kids in math of a variety of racial groups, there are white kids who definitely have these problems especially the “twice” v “half” issue. So it could be that students who are weaker at math will have that sort of problem more frequently and the students who speak BEV are correlated for some reason with more weak students. Note that this hypothesis is essentially independent of why those students would be weaker.
Here’s C.S. Lewis in 1964 (page down to “for whom are we to cater”) talking about finding out that people from different social groups understand the same words differently.
This isn’t a criticism, but one has to be careful to avoid becoming too general by using a slightly inappropriate everyday “equivalent” (which is the point of scientific/jargon words), especially with some of the material on this site.
Maybe that list wasn’t intended for scientific writing, but for popular writing. In science writing, you’re right, of course. Still, remember the table from this recent post, with examples of words which mean one thing to scientists and another to ordinary people.
Here’s C.S. Lewis in 1964 (page down to “for whom are we to cater”) talking about finding out that people from different social groups understand the same words differently.
Twice as Less is a book about students who speak Black English Vernacular having trouble with science and math because of linguistic differences—“Orr pinpoints misunderstandings that beset students whose first language is nonstandard English. Her belief that BEV is rule-governed and not merely “bad” English is supported by data from her students who, for example, confuse “twice” and “half” or combine “as” and “than” in their partitive comparisons.”
A reader review points out that some white students have the same problems.
This is an area where a lot of empirical research would be valuable, but I haven’t heard of anyone doing it. I haven’t even heard of advertisers doing it, but perhaps they don’t make their research public.
Anecdotal evidence here: From teaching and tutoring kids in math of a variety of racial groups, there are white kids who definitely have these problems especially the “twice” v “half” issue. So it could be that students who are weaker at math will have that sort of problem more frequently and the students who speak BEV are correlated for some reason with more weak students. Note that this hypothesis is essentially independent of why those students would be weaker.
This link may be more convenient.
Presumably that’s where (vi) comes in.
Yep