GeekReads

Note: it's plain talk. Not plain speak or plain writing, because that would be... complicated.

Not long after I started with Access Testing, a job came along where a client asked for a readability assessment. Being the resident word nerd, they asked me to take a look into it. The client was a government department, so they were obliged to make sure that their website content was accessible to a wide range of people. The client mentioned a “Flesch-Kincaid” score, which I’d never heard of before. So after hitting up Google for the goods, I learned about readability tests. After pitching some samples of how their text could be improved, we didn’t hear anything else from the client, and so the issue was dropped and I forgot all about scoring text for reading ease and grade levels.

Fast forward 4 months. Jenny and I are looking through a little second-hand bookshop in Balmain, and she comes over to me with a book and say “I think you’ll like this – it might help you with your writing.” It was called The Art of Plain Talk and cost a grand total of $4. “Why not,” I thought, and bought it along with a few other things, without thinking too much on it. It wasn’t until I started reading, when the author started talking about his formula for measuring readability, that I figured out this was written by the Flesch from Flesch-Kincaid.

The book definitely lives up to its title. It’s the most readable book I’ve ever read on a learned topic, evidenced by the amount of time that it took for me to finish reading it (i.e. not much) – I’ve taken longer to read novels of a similar size. The most interesting thing about this book is that it was written in the 60′s (and my copy seems to date from that era too) and the examples that the professor gives are curiosities in themselves, being a sample of the writing and media of that time. More evidence of the author’s skill: I rarely bothered to read the examples of “difficult” text because they seemed so tedious. Then again, I didn’t bother to do any of the exercises either.

The real challenge will be to see whether my writing has improved as a result of it. I know in my mind that I have to untangle some of the sentence structures that I’ve become accustomed to writing, but it’s a hard habit to break.

—-

Just for fun, the Flesch-Kincaid score for the above:

Grade level: 11 (bad)
Reading Ease score: 51 (Fairly difficult)

No thanks to the hosting issue that saw my blogs effectively offline for the most part of last month, I’ve got heaps of reviews to catch up on, so here’s a quick round up of a two non-fiction books that I got through last month.

Words Words Words, by David Crystal

What's it about again?

David Crystal is a man passionate about words. He is to linguistics what Richard Feynman was to quantum physics, or Carl Sagan to Cosmology although sadly the study of words and language doesn’t elicit the same emotional tug as the inner workings of reality or the imagination-filling possibilities of space.

Off the back of How Language Works, Crystal zooms in from the macro to the micro, looking at the atomic parts of communication. Like the othe book, he takes the reader on a whirlwind tour in each chapter, showing the enormity of the subject but keeping things light and entertaining, not overwhelming the reader, through the use of amusing anecdotes and interesting trivia.

A much more readable book that the title or topic suggests. Recommended to anybody with even a passing interest in language.

How To Draw Manga Style, by Ilya-San & Yahya El-Droubie

Does anybody else find this picture anatomically disturbing (and I don't just mean her pneumatic chest)?

I picked this up cheaply at the Borders closing down sale and read it in dribs and drabs over last last few months. The text is amiable but dry, and seems to be the efforts of a few passionate amateurs who thought they might be able to make a buck putting something together as cheaply as possible. It shows mostly in the quality of the artwork, which, while competently rendered, seems to have all been sourced from cheap Chinese artists – there’s barely a Japanese name to be found in the book (the odd nom-de-plume of one of the authors – “Ilya-san” – notwithstanding).

It’s one of those books that sits in the awkward “in between” category: too lacking in soul and energy to attract beginners beyond the initial premise, and too simplistic and preachy to be of any use to veterans.

Suffice to say, you won’t be seeing manga-style drawings in my blogs any time soon. I’ll stick to my crude pencil drawings.

It should be noted that the "bloody" is about the full extent of the bad language in the book (although "eff", "effing" and "effed" appear liberally.

Lynne Truss, the author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves, writes in a way that gets to me on a deep, instinctual level. The nitpicking pedantry, the sense that the world is terribly wrong (and I am right), and the uppity British humour, are all things that resonate with me and my core sensibilities.

Nevermind my enlightenment after David Crystal slammed “Trussians” for being ignorant in their intolerance of incorrect punctuation; as soon as I picked up Talk to the Hand, I was immediately back to my old ways again, nodding vehemently in agreement when Truss writes:

I now can’t abide many, many things, and am actually always on the look-out for more things to find completely unacceptable. Whenever I hear of someone being “gluten intolerant” or “lactose intolerant”, for example, I feel I’ve been missing out. I want to be gluten intolerant too. I mean, how much longer do we have to put up with that gluten crap?

This isn’t a book about etiquette. As Truss says, the time for those has long gone due to the prevalence of moral relativism. Instead, she provides “six good reasons to stay home and bolt the door.”

It’s a funny read if you like this sort of thing. She litters the chapters with many observations and amusing anecdotes from her own life, and selections from some old tomes on etiquette, which really highlight the difference between how the way things are now and how they used to be. There are some very pointed barbs directed at the British, causing me to wonder if Lynne might have an American twin sister who could please kindly write the American version of this book…

Looks like a snake if you squint, dunnit?

You may or may not have noticed the “Currently reading” byline beneath the title of this blog, which because of the nature of its positioning, appears on every page. I started reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan at around the same time that interest in the film of (nearly) the same name starring Natalie Portman was peaking in its post-Oscars glow, which amusingly led to a large number of search hits.

It’s this kind of serendipity that Taleb (or NNT as he often refers to himself) champions in this book. The unpredictable occurances which in hindsight seem obvious; so obvious that our minds feel compelled to join the dots retrospectively and think that we could’ve somehow worked it forward if we’d only thought to look.

The author’s writing is very self conscious, often setting out structure, positioning the reader, etc. It gives the impression of a writer who is struggling to contain his idea, but is trying his best to ensure that the reader doesn’t get lost. He succeeds in that much, and I found the text more accessible than if it were a purely intellectual work. At first his laconic, laid-back style seemed pedestrian to the point of being boorish, but his idea was so compelling to me – crystalising many of thoughts that I myself had thought, that I was fully engaged for a good part of the book.

Then the topic of applying the Black Swan idea to reality. Buried right in the middle of the book – like the miserly contents of a cheaply made BBQ pork bun – is a few precious nuggets of practical advice that one might find useful, in the same sense as the 10 commandments against the rest of the Holy Bible. Even then it’s very begrudgingly given, but reasonably so because of the author’s unreserved antagonism towards false frameworks and formulae.

In fact, Taleb gets downright rude. The latter part of the book is almost solely dedicated to the intellectual destruction of his opponents: economists and academics participating in “the Great Intellectual Fraud” of Gaussian bell curve modelling. It’s by far the bitchiest content I’ve ever read in this genre. NNT basically lays the smack down on why virtually every model is wrong, how there’s not much you can do about it, and then proceeds to name names, especially those who have crossed the author in some way. Even the Nobel Prize (specifically the one for Economics) cops a hammering.

The Black Swan is one of those books that offers intellectual emancipation. But like a domesticated animal released into the wild, I found myself not knowing what to do with the newfound freedom, and as a result reverting back to my old ways. It has caused me to think differently about things, and look much more skeptically at certain “facts” presented by the media (although in that regard I needed no help. The media are already under full assualt by blogs like Grog’s Gamut and books such as Lindsay Tanner’s recently released Sideshow).

At least now I know better than to trust Economists.

Take a look at this book (excuse my crappy photography skills – I’m working on it):

It’s a 1923 Tauchnitz Edition of H.G. Wells’ A Short History of the World (it was first published a year before in 1922). I’ll say beyond the shadow of a doubt, that it is older than anybody that will ever read GeekReads (but happy to be proved wrong, if there are any 87+ year olds out there reading this please drop me a line).  If you’re like me, which is to say a complete and utter ignoramus when it comes to history, then here’s some context: it is 9 years after World War 1 ended, 6 years before the Great Depression, blues and jazz music was starting to become popular, and sliced bread wasn’t invented yet.

Despite the terrible inconvenience of having to carve his own baked goods, the time in which H.G. Wells lived was much like ours – there was electricity, television, cars, skyscrapers and planes. And if you thought that atheism was a recent development:

Over a large part of the civilized world it was believed and taught that the world had been created suddenly in 4004 B.C., though authorities differed as to whether this had occurred in the spring or autumn of that year. [...] that the universe in which we live has existed only for six or seven thousand years may be regarded as an altogether exploded idea.

Anyway, enough marvelling – I feel like a kid in awe of how old his grandpa is, and how much he knows. But that’s exactly how I felt reading A Short History, that I was being taken on a grand tour of history by somebody much older and wiser than I. Wells’ style may not be as affable as Bill Bryson, who undertook a similar effort in the similarly titled A Short History of Nearly Everything, but the book reflects his skill as a writer with the occasional poetic turn (this is where I wish I took notes like a proper reviewer, so that I could quote something that illustrates what I mean).

Although the book helped me to better understand the reason behind why the world is the way it is today (basically, the whole world is just made up of various outposts of a few European countries) it hasn’t cured my ignorance of geography. The book comes “WITH TWELVE MAPS” as it states on the title page, but they were all reproduced in such a way as to be largely indecipherable (particularly the ones that rely on various shadings).

Finally, I found that because his perspective on history is not too far removed from our own, the comments he made about his own time, towards the conclusion of the book, are still a valuable message to us today:

[...] we are still in the stage of the first-fruits in [humanity's mastery over matter]. We have the power, but we have still to learn how to use our power. Many of the first employments of these gifts of science have been vulgar, tawdry, stupid or horrible. The artist and the adaptor have still hardly begun to work with the endless variety of substances now at their disposal.

It’s a message that some of the more prideful members of our time should heed well.

—-

If you were to update this book to include the achievements between H.G. Wells time and the present day, what would you include? I can think of: World War 2, space exploration, computers and the Internet (obviously) and nuclear power.