User talk:50.39.99.25

I'm an ex-professor of Rhetoric who is also a music historian. I've reviewed various articles addressing syncopation on the net with dismay, not at the quality of the musical content, but at the quality of the writing used to express that content. This article is a typical example. Some sentences are simply badly written. The first sentence of the article is a case in point: As written, it makes little sense, although I think I know what the writer is trying to say. In most of the article, however, the writing fails because the writer has not thought about who the likely audience is. Someone turning to a Wikipedia article about syncopation is unlikely to have much background in musical theory. They are unlikely, therefore, to understand such terms as "hemiola" and "syncope." That leaves you two choices: (1) either define such terms before you use them or (2) use simpler language to get your ideas across. Neither method is perfect. Method (1) must be used sparingly, since a flood of new terms will simply overwhelm a reader. Method (2) takes longer and will sometimes miss exact shades of meaning that the writer would like to convey. Nevertheless, using either method will communicate information. Carpet-bombing your likely audience with unfamiliar technical terms will not.

JF Walsh, Jr. (talk) 15:58, 25 May 2021 (UTC)