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Home > Guidelines > 5. Reduce cognitive burdens. > 5b. Blow up nominalizations and noun trains.. |
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5b. Blow up nominalizations and noun trains.
Before: After: Before: After:
Before: After: Before: After:
Before: After: Before: After: |
Other ways to make your text easier to understand: 5a. Reduce the number of clauses per sentence. 5c. Watch out for ambiguous phrases a user might have to debate. 5d. Surface the agent and action, so users don't have to guess. 5e. Make a positive statement. 5g. Let users print or save the entire document at once. Resources on thoughtlessness Taking a Position on Thoughtlessness Heuristic Online Text (H. O. T.) Evaluation of Cognitive Burdens
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Diagram
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BackgroundThere is a technical term for a noun derived from a verb or an adjective. It is called a nominalization. —Williams (1990) Creating a string of nouns is a clumsy
way of avoiding two or three phrases or clauses. It’s
confusing because readers lose track of the point and
wonder when it will ever end. It’s ambiguous because
people can read several nouns as an adjective phrase and
get one picture of the subject, then, looking again, see
several other nouns as a descriptive phrase, and end up
with yet another view. They’re often another form of jargon, a shorthanding of longer concepts. But clarity demands that the editor unpack the noun string. —Bush and Campbell (1995) See bibliography: Bush and Campbell (1995), Horton (1990), Price & Korman (1993), Tarutz (1992), Waite (1982), Williams (1990). |
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Don't make me think. |
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