I feel a need to anticipate and answer every possible objection, and so I lose the ability to say something simply the first time around.
I write overly convoluted sentence structures.
Possible Remedies:
I might be able to do NaNoWriMo, which would certainly train me to do without over-editing.
I’ve been wanting to do an FAQ on some issue that’s very basic and brief at first, and only summons more material when you click on a sentence that you object to.
YAKiToMe has helped me with this problem. Hearing the text as speech gives me a new perspective on what I have written; it makes the awkward stuff more obvious.
Is closing your eyes and listening to someone read a better test of intelligibility than reading aloud to yourself? I think so, in that it can be easier to fool yourself into thinking that you’ve understood something when you flyby-eyeball it.
Hmm. On the one hand, I’d get pretty impatient with that really quickly, especially given how many words I use that wouldn’t be in its dictionary. On the other hand, if it inspires me to err on the side of terse and simple English, that might be a good thing.
It does give me another good idea, though: I can print out a paper copy. With my academic papers, at least, I notice all sorts of things in print that I gloss over when it’s on a screen.
Problems I Think I Have:
I over-formalize things.
I feel a need to anticipate and answer every possible objection, and so I lose the ability to say something simply the first time around.
I write overly convoluted sentence structures.
Possible Remedies:
I might be able to do NaNoWriMo, which would certainly train me to do without over-editing.
I’ve been wanting to do an FAQ on some issue that’s very basic and brief at first, and only summons more material when you click on a sentence that you object to.
YAKiToMe has helped me with this problem. Hearing the text as speech gives me a new perspective on what I have written; it makes the awkward stuff more obvious.
Is closing your eyes and listening to someone read a better test of intelligibility than reading aloud to yourself? I think so, in that it can be easier to fool yourself into thinking that you’ve understood something when you flyby-eyeball it.
Hmm. On the one hand, I’d get pretty impatient with that really quickly, especially given how many words I use that wouldn’t be in its dictionary. On the other hand, if it inspires me to err on the side of terse and simple English, that might be a good thing.
It does give me another good idea, though: I can print out a paper copy. With my academic papers, at least, I notice all sorts of things in print that I gloss over when it’s on a screen.