Friday, July 25, 2008
A disaster plan should use simple language
A disaster plan should use simple language, so as to avoid misunderstandings. The people using the plan may not, for any of a variety of reasons (e.g. tiredness, being distracted by the disaster itself or its sequela (real or imagined), being of limited education in the field of disaster management (or generally), reading in poorly lit conditions) have the capacity to dissect intricate prose, navigate through layered parenthetical commentary (however relevant that commentary (or parts of it) may be), or understand recursive commentary. Sentences should be short. Vocabulary should be basic.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
I'm glad to see you writing about this. Important stuff. You ever read Visual Display Of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte? Right up your alley.
My writerly suggestion to you is to take all of your parenthetical subclauses give them full-fledged sentences of their own.
I'm not familiar with the book, no. I'll look it up.
My intention was for the middle sentence to provide an example of what the plan should *not* be, but you pose an interesting question: how do I maintain the example, yet still expand upon those points? I'll have to work on that.
Post a Comment