Tijdschrift voor Taalbeheersing - Volume 44, Issue 2, 2022

Abstract 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 co Read More

Abstract 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 proce Read More

Abstract 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 aforeme Read More