Posts

Showing posts with the label diction

Balancing diction (quality) and comprehensibility (effectiveness)

Image
Something which by now may have become apparent to my colleagues and friends alike, is that in personal writing I gravitate toward long and complicated sentences. The formality of my writing has also been remarked upon by more than one friend. On the other hand, I also try to optimize diction: that is, I have an old habit of attempting to use whatever word I believe is most appropriate, regardless of how rarely one might hear it. In my Japanese language post from May, I had mentioned that I experience a constant struggle to maintain linguistic competence. In fact, it seems self evident that disuse leads to atrophy in many situations, be they physical (musculature), neural (pathways to access memories) or otherwise. With tweeting, the stringent limit on message length means I struggle with the inevitable prevalence of abbreviations and  (in that case, &) initialisms - and rarely, acronyms - far more in English than I do in Japanese. However, in the latter tongue I clearly need