Tijdschrift voor Taalbeheersing - Volume 44, Issue 2, 2022

Text consultants often encounter the fear that simple language comes across as childish, especially for higher educated readers. We sought to empirically test this assumption by presenting participants with two letters from organizations (a bank and a residential care facility) to their customers. Both lexical and syntactic complexity were varied in the two texts.

In the first text, simple words both improve actual comprehension and perceived comprehensibility. The author who uses simple words is also seen as more friendly, an effect mediated by the comprehensibility judgment. In the second text, simple words again improve actual comprehension, but only in the syntactically complex text versions. Most strikingly, only the higher educated readers preferred the simpler text versions over the more complex ones.

Overall, there is no reason to fear that simple language offends readers in any way. It is less clear why the results differ for our two texts; different language expectations regarding banks and care facilities may play a role. A more fundamental question is how exactly simple language succeeds in generating positive attitudes towards the author; we end by outlining various possible explanations.

Cultured meat looks, feels and tastes like conventional meat, but is much less destructive for humans, animals and the environment. However, consumer acceptance of cultured meat is still not very high, which may have to do with the perceived unnaturalness of the way it is produced. Previous research has suggested that part of this unease can be taken away if the textual description of the production process makes use of non-technical terms, instead of the rather technical terms that are often used in information brochures. The current study failed to replicate these earlier findings: there were no significant differences between the technical text, the non-technical text, and a control condition in which no description of the production process was included. Furthermore, from our results it appears that the feeling of ‘disgust’ that is evoked when participants read about cultured meat is central in the acceptance process, and not ‘perceived naturalness’ as has been hypothesized earlier. Thus, it seems to be important to focus on reducing the feeling of disgust in further communications about cultured meat, for instance by creating associations with pleasant and tasty sensations, and leave out descriptions of the production process altogether.

Dutch style guides and teaching methods consider the direct sequence of the subordinating conjunctions dat ‘that’ and als ‘if’ a stylistic lapse. It is advised to rewrite sentences containing the sequence by repositioning the conditional als-clause to the final position of the sentence. This study aims to find out to what extent this stylistic lapse actually occurs in several types of texts, and in which situations the aforementioned advice is suitable. We use corpus data from different modes and registers, we provide an overview of language advice from grammars, style guides and teaching methods, and we provide a comparison of Dutch dat als to the treatment of that if in English usage guides. Finally, we analyze the effects of the proposed reformulations, focusing on the function of the conditional clause in context. By doing so, we aim to formulate an informed view on the wide-spread advice concerning dat als ‘that if’, and we aim to refine the advice available in the literature.