Matthew Revell

Just a quick note to say that the latest issue of Linux User and Developer magazine features an article by me on choosing a web host. The LU&D website hasn’t been updated for a while, by the looks of it, but I’m told the magazine is in newsagents now.

Today, The Stirrer published the first piece for my new column. To be honest, it’s little more than a rant in favour of the smoking ban. I can’t say I’m thrilled at the idea of being called “Wolverhampton’s own Tory Boy” but never mind.

If you’re wondering, The Stirrer is a local news website for Birmingham and the Black Country. It’s run by Adrian Goldberg, the chap who used to present BBC WM’s breakfast show. It seems to get quite a good readership and has particularly active forums, where my words are already being torn to shreds Update: after leaving a bit of a gap, I’m going to re-publish each of my Stirrer pieces here. Here’s the first.

At last, smoking has been banned in enclosed public places in England. This is fantastic news for me: I hate tobacco, I hate breathing other people’s smoke, I hate the smell of smoke on my clothes and in my hair.Now, just as I can reasonably expect not to be stabbed in the throat or robbed at gun point, so I can enjoy a pint, or a coffee or whatever else without breathing the toxic fumes from someone else’s long drawn-out suicide.

“Ah, but what about my rights to smoke without interference from the government? This is the nanny state at its worst!”, a smoker might whine, while another wheezes, “If you don’t like smoke, don’t go to pubs.”

I don’t get this at all. What right does anyone have to pollute an enclosed public space with polonium 210, arsenic, hydrogen cyanide and sulphuric acid?

So long as tobacco duty covers the NHS burden of the diseases that smokers inflict on themselves, then I don’t care if an adult wants to smoke, chew or
rectally insert tobacco. My one caveat is that they shouldn’t take me down with them.

The “health and safety gone made” brigade almost can’t believe their luck. A chorus of pre-planned harrumphs has hit blogs, most of course from those aligned to the Conservatives.

Express and Star columnist, Nigel Hastilow exemplifies how silly some of the anti-ban discourse is:  “I am sorely tempted to take up smoking again, in protest.”

Yeah, and maybe I’ll draw all over my face with felt-tip pen because my Dad told me not to when I was five; y’know, in protest.

We Conservatives dislike the idea of new laws and more control for politicians. Laws have unintended consequences, politicians are often too remote. We shouldn’t, though, oppose for the sake of opposition.

Instead, we should ensure that any potential benefits from a change to the status quo are large enough to outweigh any potential negative fall-out.

I believe I should have the right to remain free of the effects of tobacco smoke. Banning smoking in enclosed public spaces helps protect that freedom from the harmful actions of others.

Smokers are, after all, the people who’ve specifically chosen to use tobacco. The ban doesn’t stop them from smoking: it just means I get to enjoy my chosen way of life too

George Orwell set six rules for writers:

• Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
• Never use a long word where a short one will do.
• If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
• Never use the passive voice where you can use the active.
• Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
• Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

When writing for the web, follow Orwell’s rules to communicate clearly without boring your reader.

What sort of judging panel could name The Da Vinci Code “best book”? A million other people have written about it being a badly written book, filled with rubbish, so I won’t repeat all that here. Seriously, though, the Da Vinci Code is not even a good book, let alone the best book.

And for the BBC News site to refer to it as “quasi-historical” is further evidence that the Beeb really should rein in some of their online hacks, whose eagerness to believe other people’s flights of fancy are often highlighted by Ray Girvan. Perhaps “faux-historical” would have been better.

The BBC’s Ceefax service turns 30 next week. Readers of BBC News Online were asked to write a story, titled “1974″, in no more than 70 words.

The entries show how 70 well-written words can say more than a thousand that are just slapped on the page. The story by Tok Thompson, Dublin, shows just how much can be packed into a few lines; it’s powerfully evocative.

BBC Ceefax 1974 in 70 words.

Here’s an article I wrote for ContentPeople, in April/May 2003, on Flesch readability.

Clarity is the commercial writer’s goal. With practice, it comes naturally. Finding the right level of readability is usually about gut feeling and consistency.

Increasingly, larger projects are looking to objective methods of measuring readability. The first - and most used - of these is the Flesch readability formula. Devised in the 1940s by American linguist Rudolf Flesch, it measures the average number of syllables per word and words per sentence. Using Flesch’s chart and a ruler, a score is given. An easier way to check a Flesch score is with a software tool, such as Microsoft Word’s grammar checking.

In his book How to write plain English, Flesch admits that using such “a mechanical gadget for this doesn’t seem like an intelligent approach”. His belief, though, is that it reflects the process the brain uses to read. Essentially, Flesch says that it’s easier to read shorter sentences that contain shorter words. Not exactly a major breakthrough.

Perhaps the major flaw of readability formulae is their disregard for context. As John Wild, of the Plain English Campaign notes, “‘The cat sat on the mat’ has exactly the same readability index as ‘The mat sat cat the on’.” It has to be assumed, then, that anyone whose writing is measured using Flesch, or other formulae, already has a mastery of English.

Echoing John Wild’s reservations, Phil Scholfield, of the University of Essex, sees readability formulae as of limited usefulness. “While it is true that usually longer sentences and longer words are harder, that is not always so and several other things can make a text difficult, such as the complexity of its organisation and the difficulty of its thought/content.”

In an effort to achieve a higher Flesch readability score, it can be tempting to forget the actual, human readability of a piece and start slashing away at words. Almost slipping into the spirit of George Orwell’s Newspeak, Flesch suggests that writers should “take first aim at words with prefixes and suffixes, like establishment, available or required” and replace them with “a two-word combination like setting up, in stock or called for“. Rather doubleplusungood for subtlety in English, I’d say.

To be fair to Flesch, he admits that his formula is only useful as a guide. Certainly, for projects with large numbers of writers, the Flesch system can help to produce a uniformity of style. However, as web based translation services prove, language cannot be reduced to computerised rules.