The importance of writing clear texts for everyone

Culture is a human right and if we create university content, we must ensure that our texts are understandable and accessible to all.

Accessible to all?

All people should have the right to education guaranteed, as stated in Article 26.1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but it is not the case. Not all people have access to culture, even though according to Articles 22 and 27.1 of the same text, these are rights that must be ensured. It is evident that we need to fight for a more just and equal world so that these international mandates are fulfilled in all territories, and while legislation progresses, one thing we can already do (which we should have done a long time ago, in fact) is to guarantee access to cultural content for all people. Universities are places where knowledge and culture are generated, and their function, in addition to training their students to obtain their eTítulo, is to generate knowledge through research, experiments, and creations and offer them to the world in the form of academic publications. This means that universities have a fundamental value in any society to achieve the democratic ideals commanded by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as institutions that generate culture, but (Houston, we have a problem) they may not be doing it as well as they should.

Sender, medium, message, and receiver

When transmitting a message, it is important to consider the elements of communication. And above all, to understand its purpose, which is for the receiver to understand the sender's message. Imagine going to a conference on the new technologies that will change the video game industry in the coming years, and the speaker, who is a true authority in her field, speaks non-stop for an hour and a half in a dead language. What do we do? Do we endure until the end? Do we get up and leave? Do we try to understand what she is saying with Google's translator for dead languages? A poorly written text has the same effect on its readers, no matter how interesting the content is or how expert the writer is. And while some are more disciplined and stay until the end trying to decipher what the text says, most will get up and leave. Or at least their brains will distract them over and over again. It's their fault, people no longer make an effort for anything, knowledge requires work! Some will say, but it's not true. The fault for readers not understanding a poorly written text lies with the person who wrote it poorly. Period.

The goal of clarity

Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, a rhetorician and pedagogue from the 1st century, said that The goal of clarity means not that what we say can be understood, but that it cannot, in any way, not be understood. And if they have been telling us this for 21 centuries, why doesn't it sink in? Well, for several reasons: because we imitate others who have not known how to write or transmit, because of acquired habits when reading texts with professional language (which is not necessarily correct), because of lack of interest, and above all, because of a cause that is particularly irritating: ego. We come across countless absolutely unreadable academic texts that force us to read and reread and even generate anxiety (especially if we are going to take an exam). These are texts whose content is essential and whose form is tear-inducing. And they are like this because they are written by authors who decided that the important thing was to sit on a throne of knowledge instead of thinking about sharing it.

What is wrong?

In these incomprehensible texts, the structure is wrong, starting and ending an idea is wrong, using pompous language or the absence of commas and periods that generate endless sentences that would kill us from hypoxia if we tried to read them out loud. And it's not about not using complex or technical words, because the reader can easily look them up in a dictionary; it's about not writing to seem, but to communicate, it's about telling what we want in the simplest way possible. There is also a very classic and easily avoidable mistake in these texts, which is the use of anaphoric expressions. We will explain it with an example:

1. We went to eat at a restaurant, it was on the side of the road, and the noise of the cars passing by could be heard from inside it.


2. We went to eat at a restaurant, it was on the side of the road, and the noise of the cars passing by could be heard from inside it.


3. We went to eat at a restaurant that was on the side of the road, and the noise of the cars passing by could be heard from inside it.

Well, an anaphora is an empty expression like "itself" or "this." They are used to give the text a more formal or elegant air, but they backfire because even the Royal Spanish Academy considers them an error; they are useless expressions that complicate a text and even make us make agreement errors. We assume that, after this explanation, it is not necessary to say which of the three examples is correct, so let's try to remember this maxim: anaphoric expressions like "itself" and "this" are the wannabe and the failure of writing. Sentences in which we make digressions (in parentheses, commas, or dashes) must still make sense if we remove the digression, as is clearly seen here, and that is something that is not always respected in bad writing, so the reader loses the thread of what they were being told. The terrible thing about these errors is that they also seem to give writing an elitist veneer, and we feel good because we believe we have demonstrated a very high cultural level, when in fact what we do is make fools of ourselves and fail to comply with that mandate of the UDHR letter that tells us that culture must be accessible to all people.

Undesirable inequality and the Artext system

Unfortunately, not everyone can study. Not all people who want to can afford it. If our function is to create and disseminate knowledge and we only manage to do 50% of our job, we are doing it wrong. Academic texts must be democratized because they are a good of humanity and humanity must be able to read and understand them. Knowledge cannot be elitist; it cannot be another insurmountable wall that separates social classes and accentuates the differences between humans. Culture must be democratized once and for all, and that begins by creating materials that are understandable for everyone, and with that spirit, the Artext tool is born, which helps us write clear texts by allowing us to upload our writings to be told how to improve our writing. Isn't that fantastic? We certainly think that all university work and all academic articles should, without a doubt, pass its filter. At least, this type of initiative gives us hope. What do you think?