Publication Date
3-1-2021
Abstract
Instructors from English department praise our students when they use the most sophisticated grammatical constructions and the most appropriate (often rarely used) words -- as long as this helps better convey all the subtleties of the meaning. On the other hand, we usually teach the students to use the most primitive Basic English when writing our papers -- this way, the resulting paper will be most accessible to the international audience. Who is right? In this paper, we analyze this question by using a natural model -- inspired by Zipf's law -- and we conclude that to achieve the largest possible effect, the paper should be written on an intermediate level -- not too primitive, not too sophisticated (actually, on the level of the middle school).
Comments
Technical Report: UTEP-CS-21-31
Published in Proceedings of the 14th International Workshop on Constraint Programming and Decision Making CoProd'2021, Szeged, Hungary, September 12, 2021.