Matthew Revell

I saw the phrase “stolen from Carmen” and it led me to write this. It’s pure fiction, very rough and I wouldn’t usually post it here but I quite enjoyed writing it. It hasn’t benefited from editing or more than just a few minutes in a text editor.

Last night, when the rain made bubbles in your windscreen glass, I tried so hard not to look.

Motorway lights flashed amber as we passed; gave me seconds-long glimpses of the face I’d so long dreamt I’d wake to. Your hand on the gear-stick — shaking with the vibration of that dying car — pulled at me. But touching you — even there, alone — would have too soon shattered our odd little truce.

Songs in minor keys played on the radio, drew tears across my cheeks. No matter: as I counted down the miles I knew I’d always hold close the memories of that, our final journey.

Soon, we came to the sea and my thoughts turned to that one night we’d spent together. I swallowed hard as I remembered the shivers your fingers sent through me, the ache you nurtured. Those few moments — stolen from Carmen — would be the barrier to any normal future I could hope for.

Out of the car window I saw the bridge and felt the seconds slipping away; yet again I was falling towards something, out of control. You stopped, I opened the door; could’ve sworn I heard the ping of a submarine from beneath the waves. You stared directly ahead but I saw it: that quiver of your eyelid meant more to me than anything you might have said.

Within seconds, you were nothing more than tail-lights and memories.

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.

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.