Communication is complex

Krishna Kumar has written a great post summarizing what I’ve been doing lately with f-scores in blogs. My favorite quote:

The complexity of language exists not because some people are pretentious and want to sound different (maybe they do), but because life and people’s behavior is essentially complicated and has different levels of subtle variations.

I don’t think there is any better way of saying it. Many people have the idea that how we express ourselves can be judged purely on a good-to-bad scale. They believe that style is essentially a matter of personal discipline and that keeping things simple should always be the maxim. Of course it is advisable to be clear and concise, but there’s a reason why legal documents aren’t composed with a subjective, first-person point of view and why a blog post about C# from MSDN won’t read like the new Harry Potter novel. Complex information often requires complex expression and relating facts is just one of many, many things we do with language (think about flirting, bartering, begging, lying, promising, joking, swearing, storytelling, testifying, praying and lecturing). The complexity of these expressions and of the abstract system that we all constantly use to create them – language – is what linguistics is all about. And it is for that reason that people like Geoff Pullum get testy when they are faced with students who believe that one should omit adjectives because they are ‘needless words’*.

Language as a system decides the basic shape of an utterance. The sentence

To fruit the man woman give

is not a comprehensible English sentence, no matter in what kind of context I use it. It isn’t bad style. It simply doesn’t parse, because it isn’t grammatical. We have an idea that different things and people are involved (man, woman, fruit) but no idea how they relate to each other. When does what is being related happen (past, future, right now)? We simply don’t know because the grammatical information is missing.

By comparison, the two sentences

A blast of snow, gusty winds and plunging temperatures in the Midwest created headaches for travelers Tuesday with canceled flights and slick, slushy roads.

and

i like *totally* LUV coffee

are both perfectly grammatical, even though the second one contains non-standard spelling, a discourse marker (like) and an intensifier (totally), which prior to the advent of the Web and text messaging weren’t commonly used in that way in written communication. But the sentences aren’t just stylistically different. We can easily recognize that they are taken from different contexts and that they are likely to be used for expressing different things. Spoken conversation has an important social function, while traditional written composition seeks to create texts which are durable and context-independent, because it is assumed that author and reader are socially, spatially and chronologically distanced from one another. That, in a nutshell, is the difference between publishing and communicating, and one doesn’t need to think too hard to realize that blogging and other new forms of text-based communication are muddying that distinction considerably. On top of these things, there are factors such as personal stylistic preference and genre that have significant effect on how we write. So, communication is indeed complex – as Krishna notes – and gaining an understanding of its complexities means gaining an understanding of our culture and society.
That’s the bigger picture.

* He is talking about this rather famous publication and calls it a noxious and misguided little book [...] a book full of recommendatory maxims that have been elevated into fascist edicts. Nope, you won’t find a lot of people in the field who have anything nice to say about Strunk and White.