Stylish writing

[Gabriel_L]

This may be of help:

The quiet genius of the paragraph

Consider the humble paragraph. There it sits, silently, helping us to read, to comprehend, to become wiser and better people. Unnoticed, it never asks for gratitude or recognition. It just goes about its job, making communication a little better. A paragraph lends structure to a piece of writing. The first sentence tells us the main idea of the paragraph. A good first sentence is brief, clear, and confident. Then the rest of the paragraph expands on that. So if we’re in a hurry, a paragraph hel…

Testing readability of sutta translations

How important is readability? A simpler text will be more widely read and better comprehended. Here are two classic studies, quoted from Wikipedia. In 1947, Donald Murphy of Wallace’s Farmer used a split-run edition to study the effects of making text easier to read. They found that reducing from the 9th to the 6th-grade level increased readership 43% for an article on ‘nylon’. There was a gain of 42,000 readers in a circulation of 275,000. He found a 60% increase in readership for an article …