I don't remember how I found these pages, but they're kind of nice:
http://www.voanews.com/specialenglish/
VOA is the Voice of America; the government-sponsored worldwide radio broadcasts. "Special English" is a deliberate style of writing designed to make the content accessible to non-native English speakers who want to learn the language.
"Special English writers use short, simple sentences that contain only one idea. They use active voice. They do not use idioms."
Those actually could be good rules for writing in general--- rules I often break, especially regarding idioms. Hmmm.
The other nice thing about the site is the balance in most of the reporting. I expected raw propaganda and a huge pro-USA bias (and more importantly, pro-administration slant; especially after seeing how much of the rest of the Government has been blatantly politicized), but the site is much more even-handed than I expected. Check out this article for example:
"Just What Does Patriotism Mean in America? Issue Enters Into Campaign"
http://www.voanews.com/specialenglish/2008-07-05-voa5.cfm
Props to the VOA staffers!
Ah, shortwave. Brings back memories. I don't know about others, but Deutsche Welle (German equivalent of VOA) also has a similar service in German where they read the news "slowly." It's called Langsam gesprochene Nachrichten. You can find it here:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.dw-world.de/didAktuelles?maca=de-podcast_langsam_gesprochene_nachrichten-775-xml-mrss
I suspect there are similar broadcasts in Frence and Spanish. Good stuff.
No idioms is a great rule for special English - but for ordinary English it would be like leaving the salt out.
ReplyDeleteGavrielle