I had someone on a forum I frequent ask me a question. It’s in broken English and he explained that he’s not a native speaker. In my reply, I tried to be sensitive to that by speaking somewhat simply. Not in a demeaning way, but in my attempts to learn Spanish, I learned very quickly that short sentences expressing one simple idea are much simpler than elaborate sentences conveying a complex range of thoughts, such as this one.

And that reminded me of the Simple English Wikipedia project, which I think should get more attention. They treat it like another language: there’s English, Spanish, Simple English, etc. A really awesome idea in my opinion. (Although the sexual intercourse page–warning, has an illustration of the process–is still pretty sketchy… Maybe because it’s not a topic that lends itself to being explained in simple, direct terms?)

I think “Simple English” is something everyone should practice, though. As some of the pages on the simple.wikipedia.org site show, writing in a simple manner does not necessarily require coming across like a dimwit.