Fun_People Archive
16 Nov
Autologous Sentence of the Day

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From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 98 12:22:48 -0800
To: Fun_People
Precedence: bulk
Subject: Autologous Sentence of the Day

X-Lib-of-Cong-ISSN: 1098-7649
Forwarded-by: Michael Travers <mt@watson.ibm.com>

From: RISKS
From: Bertrand Meyer <Bertrand.Meyer@eiffel.com>
Subject: Dumbing down English speech

Although complaints about Microsoft Word's eagerness to correct what it sees
as mistakes are not new in RISKS, I think it is still useful to protest
vehemently the way Word 97 promotes the dumbing down of English writing by
flagging (when you use its default options) any sentence which, according
to some mysterious criterion, it deems too long, even if the sentence is
made of several semicolon-separated clauses, and even though it is perfectly
obvious to anyone, fan of Proust or not, that clarity is not a direct
function of length, since it is just as easy to write obscurely with short
sentences as with longish ones and, conversely, quite possible to produce
an absolutely limpid sentence that is very, very long.

© 1998 Peter Langston