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Rules of good writing (2007)

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102 points santiviquez | 1 comments | 07 Jul 25 14:03 UTC | HN request time: 2.162s | source
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mtlynch ◴[08 Jul 25 23:50 UTC] No.44505052[source]▶
>Readers comprehend “the boy hit the ball” quicker than “the ball was hit by the boy.” Both sentences mean the same, but it’s easier to imagine the object (the boy) before the action (the hitting). All brains work that way.

I agree with this, but I doubt that all brains work this way. It's probably true of almost all English speakers.

I think the processing effort is likely a side effect of English mainly using sentence constructions that go subject->verb->object. Not all languages do that, so I suspect that your brain has an easier time processing whatever's most common in the language.

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1. globnomulous ◴[09 Jul 25 06:21 UTC] No.44506838[source]▶
> I think the processing effort is likely a side effect of English mainly using sentence constructions that go subject->verb->object. Not all languages do that, so I suspect that your brain has an easier time processing whatever's most common in the language.

This isn't true at all. Passive voice is extremely common in everyday speech, and sentences constructed with linking verbs are almost certainly more common than either active or passive voice.

And that accounting of the language considers only utterances consistinf od grammatically correct, complete main clauses, which constitute by far the minority of the sentential constructions a native speaker of English will produce in a day.

If everything you said in a normal day were a complete sentence, let alone uniformly or predominantly active voice, you'd sound completely deranged and unhinged.

If whatever's most common in the language really were easiest for readers or listeners to understand, then active-voice constructions should be the most cognitively challenging. They aren't.