Plain wording

Type: kb/types/instruction.md

Replace wording that costs the reader effort without carrying meaning: figures that display the writer, and unusual words where a common word says the same thing.

Effort: simple. Listing and marking against a recorded threshold; the operator strikes.

  1. List every candidate with a proposed replacement. Do not apply any. Two kinds of candidate:
  2. A figurative phrase, with a literal statement.
  3. An unusual word, with the common word that says the same thing. Unusual means a general technical reader would pause on it or look it up: rare or learned words (ameliorate, adumbrate, orthogonal used for "independent"), Latin tags (inter alia, mutatis mutandis), and long words with a short everyday equivalent (utilize, endeavour, commence).
  4. For each figure, ask whether the mapping does work the literal phrase would need more words to do. A tradeoff as buying and paying, a successor chain as descent, an internal role as being inside: these stay. A dramatic or legal verb applied to an argument (indict, touch, rescue), a contest verb (lose, win), or an adverb of manner that adds no content (quietly, silently): these go.
  5. For each unusual word, ask whether the common word keeps the claim and its qualifications. Replace when it does. Keep when the common word drops a distinction the sentence relies on and no short plain phrase recovers it, and say which distinction. Replace every occurrence of a word with the same common word; one occurrence swapped and another kept reads as two referents.
  6. Return the list marked keep or replace, with the reason in a few words. The operator strikes items. Apply only what survives.
  7. When the literal phrase needs a referent the figure did not name (who is charged, what is at fault), do not choose one. Report the phrase as a question with the candidate referents.

Report: the applied replacements, one line each. The operator's strikes are recorded as the threshold for the next run.

Preserve: technical terms that look figurative or unusual but are the field's or the KB's registered words (seed, holding a theory, gradient descent, legible, ampliative); a term the artifact itself defines; and quoted text, which is never reworded. Whether a registered abstraction should give way to the ordinary word is the abstractions pass's question, not this one's.