Don't make your readers hold parts of the sentence in their head. Reorder or split sentences until it can be avoided. In other words, use a really small buffer.
"You must fill form 331 unless you are over 60 years old, in which case you must fill form 445."
"You must fill form 331. If you are over 60 years old, you must fill 445 instead."
"If you are over 60 years old, you must fill form 445. Otherwise, you must fill form 331."
You might have noticed that the last version is an if-else statement.
Overflowing that buffer really does feel like a stack overflow, too. Your whole mental state just suddenly disappears in a puff of smoke.
This resplendent sentence in the Vulkan spec did it to me the other day:
The layout of subresources of images on other logical devices that are bound to VkDeviceMemory objects associated with the same underlying memory resources as external memory objects on the lost device becomes VK_IMAGE_LAYOUT_UNDEFINED.
I got about half way through and suddenly discovered I didn't know where I was, what year it was or my name.
Trying to rewrite that sentence so it's comprehensible is an interesting exercise. How about this?
(I don't know anything about Vulkan, and there is some ambiguity in the quoted sentence, so I've given a few different versions with different meanings. Note that the ambiguity is not necessarily a flaw in the quoted sentence -- it may be perfectly unambiguous, albeit very unclear, to anyone with any knowledge of Vulkan.)
If a device is lost, the subresources of some images on other logical devices may have their layout become VK_IMAGE_LAYOUT_UNDEFINED. This happens if the VkDeviceMemory object to which the image is bound is associated with the same underlying memory resources as an external memory object on the lost device.
... or, if an image isn't necessarily bound to exactly one VkDeviceMemory object, ...
If a device is lost, the subresources of some images on other logical devices may have their layouts become VK_IMAGE_LAYOUT_UNDEFINED. This happens if the image is bound to a VkDeviceMemory object which is associated with the same underlying memory resources as an external memory object on the lost device.
... or, if it's the other logical device bound to a VkDeviceMemory object rather than the image:
If a device is lost, the subresources of images on other logical devices may have their layouts become VK_IMAGE_LAYOUT_UNDEFINED. This happens if the other device is bound to a VkDeviceMemory object which is associated with the same underlying memory resources as an external memory object on the lost device.
Or maybe a slightly different structure. "If a device is lost, and some VkDeviceMemory object is associated with hte same underlying memory resources as an external memory object on that lost device, then all subresources of any image bound to that VkDeviceMemory object have their layout set to VK_IMAGE_LAYOUT_UNDEFINED."
But I can't help thinking that this really wants a diagram. Nodes for the logical devices, the images, the VkDeviceMemory object, the "underlying memory resources", the external memory object. Labelled arrows for relationships like "bound to", "has as underlying memory resource", "is a subresource of", etc.
And it seems as if this business of "having your layout set to VK_IMAGE_LAYOUT_UNDEFINED" deserves a name. (Naming things is a powerful general technique for reducing cognitive stack overflows.)
"Under some circumstances, the memory resources associated with an image may be invalidated, in which case all subresources of the image will have layout VK_IMAGE_LAYOUT_INVALIDATED and [explain here the consequences of that]. In this case, the image is said to be layout-invalidated. " ... And then later, when talking about lost devices, you say "If a device is lost, images on other logical devices may be layout-invalidated. This happens when the image is bound to a VkDeviceMemory object, and that object is associated with the same underlying memory resources as an external memory object on the lost device."
Most of the time if someone speaks to me in a non-casual context, my brain is constantly navigating the pathing process you describe. Although language is often not ambiguous, most people do not make their meaning as explicit as necessary to avoid confusion.
A lot of philosophy essays are written as part of the writer being in the process of trying to figure things out for themselves, without quite having gotten there yet.
A meeting of faculty heads is taking place. The topic - funding. The chairman says: "Hey, physicists, why are you so expensive? You need all those gadgets and materials to perform your experiments. Look at the mathematicians. All they need to produce a research paper are a box of paper, a box of pencils, and a trash can."
"We don't even need trash cans, sir." announces the dean of Philosophy.
That's a lot of qualified noun phrases. This should just be an s-expression. It's already one, honestly, but without the right parenthesis.
(becomes (qualified (layout of subresources of images on other logical devices) (bound . (same-memory-resources (VkDeviceMemory objects) (external memory objects on the lost device)))) VK_IMAGE_LAYOUT_UNDEFINED)
Will natural-language tools eventually help us turn these puddles of nouns into reasonable sentences?
I don’t think we’d see the difference if everybody had roughly the same number. Ive seen people who have a few more slots than average and it appears quite inpressive, they keep on stacking up when I already overflow. It’s probably got to do with how they chunk their information though.. But a piece of paper and a pencil can do wonders
> Don't make your readers hold parts of the sentence in their head.
Funny to read this as I'm learning German! In German the main verb of a sentence has to be at the end depending on the context (e.g: if it is a question, or following some prepositions such as "dass").
Let's say we want to build a question, it will be constructed this way:
1. question marker (such as "Was", "Wo", "Warum", etc)
2. subject
3. other details regarding the subject (adjectives and others)
4. the verb, with correct grammatical form depending on the subject
Something I find quite frustrating is that I have to keep in mind everything about the subject during the entire duration of the sentence just to be able to use the verb correctly. So because of this I always try to keep the distance between a subject and the verb as short as possible when trying to speak German, which results in very terse sentences that looks similar to what you described.
My life partner speaks native German and doesn't even realize that she does this buffering.
A famously playful version of this is the first sentence of Kafka's Metamophorphosis. The reader has the concept of Gregor Samsa waking in his bed from uneasy dreams and then a monstrous vermin in their heads, and the verb they're definitely not expecting to link this subject and object is 'transformed into'...
It's a pain for the translator to pull off the same effect in most other languages.
An American woman visiting Berlin - intent on hearing Bismarck speak - obtained two tickets for the Reichstag visitors' gallery and enlisted an interpreter to accompany her.
Soon after their arrival, Bismarck rose and began to speak. The interpreter, however, simply sat listening with intense concentration. The woman, anxious for him to begin translating, nudged and budged him, to no avail.
Finally, unable to control herself any longer, the woman burst out: "What is he saying!?" "Patience, madam," the interpreter replied. "I am waiting for the verb."
I had a Brazilian roommate who could second this. He (jokingly) complained this was the absolute worst when dealing with split-proposition-verbs:
E. g. "aufgeben" translated part-by-part is "upgive", so "to surrender" or "to give up" in English.
However, in sth. like 3rd position singular, the form would be "er gibt auf" ("he gives up"). But in German, the object goes between "gives" and "up".
Thus, my roommate mentioned a sentence like "Der Präsident gibt sein Versprechen zur Verbesserung der Arbeitslosigkeitsquote auf" (The President gives up his promise about improving unemploymemt rates).
So yeah, parsing German sometimes results a pause while everyone unwinds their stack.
Well, English too has some interesting ideas where to put prepositions in the sentence, that is, turn them basically into postpositions. For example, "Which basket did you put that exquisite marble figurine in?"
The "in" is logically related to "which basket", so one would expect that the question would actually be *"In which basket...", but nope, that's rustic and colloquial at best. I suspect it's because of the word inversion in questions, since in dependent clauses the order is reasonable: "I put the figurine in this woven concrete basket over there".
"In which basket did you put that exquisite marble figurine?" is perfectly good English. It sounds better to me that the "which ... in" version. (British English speaker.)
Could the tension/buffering in that sentence be resolved with something like: "Which basket has got that exquisite marble figurine"? When spoken by a native speaker 'has got' would likely be contracted to "which basket's got"
Sub out 'has got' for 'contains' if you want to be more formal.
Shorten even further to "Exquisite marble figure; which basket?" or "which basket? Exquisite marble figure." Depending on which is more likely to short circuit based on context.
I have in mind an idea for a movie scenario where someone important is on their death bed and says their last words, and nobody can tell what they actually meant because it may be missing the second part of the verb, resulting in a potentially completely different meaning :)
>An average sentence, in a German newspaper, is a sublime and impressive curiosity; it occupies a quarter of a column; it contains all the ten parts of speech--not in regular order, but mixed; it is built mainly of compound words constructed by the writer on the spot, and not to be found in any dictionary--six or seven words compacted into one, without joint or seam--that is, without hyphens; it treats of fourteen or fifteen different subjects, each enclosed in a parenthesis of its own, with here and there extra parentheses, making pens with pens: finally, all the parentheses and reparentheses are massed together between a couple of king-parentheses, one of which is placed in the first line of the majestic sentence and the other in the middle of the last line of it--AFTER WHICH COMES THE VERB, and you find out for the first time what the man has been talking about; and after the verb--merely by way of ornament, as far as I can make out--the writer shovels in "HABEN SIND GEWESEN GEHABT HAVEN GEWORDEN SEIN," or words to that effect, and the monument is finished. I suppose that this closing hurrah is in the nature of the flourish to a man's signature--not necessary, but pretty. German books are easy enough to read when you hold them before the looking-glass or stand on your head--so as to reverse the construction--but I think that to learn to read and understand a German newspaper is a thing which must always remain an impossibility to a foreigner.
I knew a German to Polish translator and she complained about how hard live translation was when a key part of the sentence is held until the very end.
As someone who is also learning German (Viel Glück!), doesn't the verb always go into the second position unless:
1. It's an infinitive verb, perfect verb, or a verb in a subclause, in which case it goes to the end.
2. You're asking a question without a question word (i.e. "Can you" or "Will you") or issuing a command, in which case the verb moves to the beginning).
Examples:
Verb in second position:
> "Was willst du" -> What do you want?
Infinitive verb at the end of the clause:
> "Ich will mit dir reden" -> I want to talk to you
Conjugated verb at the end of a subclause:
> "Kannst du mir versprechen, dass du mich nie verlassen -wirst?" -> Can you promise you will never leave me
Just to clarify, I'm not any sort of authority on this. Merely trying to double check my own understanding as I continue on my language learning journey :)
Pretty much! However, as such it's really only second in simple present and preterite statements, which are actually sort of rare outside of really simple sentences.
In light of that, the default German construction is effectively verb-last. (separable prefixes moving to the end exacerbates this need for buffering too)
Good point! The separable verb things is super strange for me as a native English speaker. I haven't internalized the meaning for any separable verbs so whenever I see them in text, I usually end up having to re-read or re-listen to the text with the knowledge in mind to actually get the meaning.
I learned Dutch, which does the same thing with the verb, and at one point after a few years it just clicked and started feeling natural to structure sentences that way. I've been living abroad long enough that occasionally I catch myself trying to organize English sentences in that way as I'm speaking (which, of course, results in falling flat on my face at the end.)
In Dutch at least, you can imagine these really long sentences which build up details, adding more and more, until they finally surprise you with the verb at the end. But in practice people don't speak that way - the patterns of speech and just the way people use the language in different subtle ways mostly prevents that from happening, in natural ways that don't feel terse. It may be different in academia/legal professions and that sort of thing.
Actually, in Dutch there is quite some flexibility in verb ordering. Teachers actively warn against so-called pliers-constructions where a subordinate clause is wedged between subject and verb.
Example time!
Dutch: "De man die de vrouw die bloemen plukt kust."
Literally: "The man who (the woman (who flowers picks)) kisses"
Meaning: "The man who kisses the woman that is picking flowers"
The subordinate clause is sandwiched between subject and verb. However, Dutch allows the following order:
Dutch: "De man die de vrouw kust die bloemen plukt."
Literally: "The man who (the woman) kisses (who flowers picks)"
In this case the verb kisses has moved to the front. It is a transformation that allows a form of tail recursion elimination. After the main verb the parse stack for the main clause can be popped and all resources dedicated to parsing the trailing subordinate clause(s). This allows us to string together quite a lot of subclauses without getting lost.
> This allows us to string together quite a lot of subclauses without getting lost.
Correct, a sentence like this is quite easy to read:
De man, die gewoonlijk zijn handen afveegt aan zijn broek, besloot dit keer zijn handen af te vegen aan de handdoek die zijn vrouw, die gister nog bloemen aan het plukken was, specifiek hiervoor had neergelegd.
Oh my, yes. Although I disagree, as it's not such a hard thing when you break it down, I'm usually considered a language genius. I am fluent in more than a handful of languages and my travel activity of choice is learning the local language as fast as I can, which starts yielding real results around the 2 week mark. But despite living in Germany for 16 years and having studied it in a bilingual middle school for a handful more, I don't dare near a German newspaper.
Japanese has proven similarly hard, but for completely different reasons.
Reminds me of this excellent sentence of Hofstadter's, on the concept of treating language as a stack composed of clauses and popped by verbs:
"The proverbial German phenomenon of the 'verb-at-the-end', about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nunplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic pushing and popping."
I’m from Austria, so I speak german, but I don’t think we buffer. We guess through out the sentence what the next part might be and slowly move that assumption to the final meaning of the sentence. That’s why I have to reread a sentence, when I was wrong. Same principle as in jokes.
I think none of those is the best way to write this. Start with the conditional first, so the reader knows a branch is coming. Then have the most common case immediately following. Invert the conditional if that's necessary to put the common case first. Restating the opposite of the conditional can make it even clearer.
"If you are age 59 or under, fill form 331. If you are 60 or over, fill form 445."
Experienced UX practitioners will immediately note that a surprisingly large proportion of users don't actually know how old they are; furthermore, of those that do, another significant segment will (intentionally or otherwise) mis-state their age, date of birth etc.
This problem is further exacerbated by the wide variety of temporal arithmetic possibilities any such workflow might adopt.
The solution is to either combine the forms, or (in an interactive context) ask the user if they were born before 1960, then give them the right form.
I'm in my twenties. Sometimes I forget my age. Only ever by one year -- I just don't remember if my birthday passed or not. Kind of like in January when write oit today's date and accidentally use the previous year. After a few mistakes, your brain adjusts and you start using the right one. Same thing for my age, except that I don't actually think about my age very often; it hasn't mattered much since I passed 21.
A colleague of a old friend would recall your birth year (and date?) to know your age. It is a value about you that doesn’t change and then you can derive the age.
I’ve started doing similar now. I don’t often recall my age or the number of years my wife and I have been married, or, heck, even our kid’s ages. But I recall all the years and dates. In this way, I more easily appear to recall the right value.
Your last one requires keeping the first clause of the first sentence in your head; just because you've split sentences doesn't mean you've avoided that, because “otherwise” imports the conditional in the previous sentence by reference and then inverts it. To actually avoid requiring the reader to keep sentence parts in their head, use if-then or do-if constructs, but not if-then-else constructs.
“Complete form 445 if you are over 60 years old. Complete form 331 if you are 60 years old or younger.”
That's a bad example of how to express age limits. If I've just had my 60th birthday, or perhaps today is my birthday, which applies, or do I have to fill in both forms?
Also, is it my age at the time I sign the form, or my age at the time the form is received, that matters? Arguably that's a problem with the rule itself rather than how it's expressed. It's better if you can write something like: "If you were born before 6 April 1960 ... otherwise ...". Note that "after 6 Apr 1960" is arguably more ambiguous than "before 6 Apr 1960" because there's a slight risk that someone could interpret "6 Apr 1960" as meaning 1960-04-06 00:00:00.
This problem is vaguely related to the insurance policy renewals that leave a one-minute gap between the old policy and the new policy, and even more vaguely related to the ambiguity of "midnight on the next day".
> It's better if you can write something like: "If you were born before 6 April 1960 ... otherwise ...". Note that "after 6 Apr 1960" is arguably more ambiguous than "before 6 Apr 1960" because there's a slight risk that someone could interpret "6 Apr 1960" as meaning 1960-04-06 00:00:00.
I strongly prefer pairing “before” and “on or after” (or “on or before” with “after”) when it comes to dates. “On <date>” is widely and conventionally understood to encompass the entire day, and it seems to make it far less likely than with after/before alone with “otherwise” that people will trip up over boundary conditions. But the right phrasing is highly sensitive to the context and the underlying rule; if it's an age based rule and you have fixed text that doesn't dynamically adjust by dates you can't use date-based language even if it would be clearer.
Oh man I'm having day nightmare flashbacks about the time I spent days parsing some well-meant European Energy-Saving directive and figuring out whether we could sell a PC with a fixed-frequency CPU, and all power- and energy-saving features disabled (latency concerns). Ouch... There were some official and unofficial logic diagrams and they made things even worse. Lexicon was pretty vague, use-cases too, exceptions too... and you end up writing some kind of justification for you being one of the special cases and praying it's OK. And it wasn't even the worst normative document I've ever read. It was clear about the spirit of the directive...
Imprecise language to allow flexibility and 'let the judges decide'... I'm not sure I'm comfortable with common-law-inspired regulation.
I disagree. Putting the "if" clause first means you can skip this sentence. In other words, the if-sentences are guard clauses to the default option (fill form 331).
In other words, it's not really an if-else block, but just an if statement before the default scenario. Almost everyone has to fill form 331.
I think the sentence structure you suggest would quickly make a longer text tedious to read. I have experimented with that sentence format, and it added a lot of text, but not a lot of clarity.
I also think that putting the if statement at the end makes little sense, just like when reading code.
I think you gave a good reason why passive voice is preferred in some situations.
To me (I am not a native speaker), the default emphasis is on the first words:
The police stopped the riot. -> emphasis on the police
The riot was stopped by the police. -> emphasis on the riot
It coincides with the examples in which passive voice is recommended.
> To make something less hostile - 'this bill has not been paid' (passive) is softer than 'you have not paid this bill' (active).
> To avoid taking the blame - 'a mistake was made' (passive) rather than 'we made a mistake' (active).
...
Yes, I agree that we often overuse passive voice, and active voice is a good default. However, I think that the rule of thumb should be "write in the natural order", rather than "don't use passive voice unless strictly necessary".
None of this can really be pinned on the use of passive voice. Attention is naturally drawn by the beginning of a sentence and to the end of it, and while the passive is a powerful tool for reordering sentences, its function is equally well served by verbs with the opposite alignment. There is nothing about "there were mistakes" or "mistakes happened" that attributes more agency to anyone than "mistakes were made", but only the last one is passive.
Rather, there is a rich history in English prescriptivism of misdiagnosing and blaming the passive for all ills.
The overwhelming reason why bureaucrats (either those in government or in corporate middle management) love the passive voice is "to avoid taking the blame" (or to avoid appearing to blame someone powerful).
Or just have a proper online form that asks for your DoB and leads you through entry of the necessary info.
FWIW in UK 'must' in gov advice indicates a legal obligation. It annoys me no end when such obligations are not supported by references to legislation: as then I can't check if they've been correctly interpreted.
I did start adding little calculators and utilities in my articles, but those only make sense because I have a lot of free time.
I heavily cite sources, so at least you'd know the exact paragraph in the law that supports it. It's something my competitors neglect, and it makes it hard to tell facts apart from hearsay.
The worst of the three versions you've given is the second, as it makes use of a sentence which, taken on its own, is a lie.
It's poor writing to state a mistruth and then whittle away at it until you arrive at the truth. Far better to build up truth upon truth until you arrive at the full picture.
Bad:
A natural number greater than 1 cannot be expressed as the product of two smaller natural numbers, if it is prime.
Good:
A prime number is a natural number greater than 1 that is not a product of two smaller natural numbers. (Stolen from Wikipedia.)
My point was there's an additional anti-pattern at play. As the reader progresses through a sentence, they shouldn't have to mentally cross out previously made categorical claims. This isn't quite the same thing as the stack overflow problem.
I'm afraid I don't see your rephrasing as an improvement. It doesn't substantially restructure the sentence, and to someone familiar with the mathematical writing style, it reads less naturally.
The last one is only good if you actually read it. I might end up seeing the first clause, assuming the entire line is irrelevant, and moving on without seeing the "Otherwise".
Prefer declarative statements:
"If you are 60 or older, you must fill form 445.
If you are 59 or younger, you must fill form 331."
"You must fill form 331 unless you are over 60 years old, in which case you must fill form 445."
"You must fill form 331. If you are over 60 years old, you must fill 445 instead."
"If you are over 60 years old, you must fill form 445. Otherwise, you must fill form 331."
You might have noticed that the last version is an if-else statement.