[WikiEN-l] Re: Writing with our readers in mind

[Karl A. Krueger]

On Tue, Jul 12, 2005 at 01:15:42PM -0000, Haukur ?orgeirsson wrote:
> > Starting from when I was a small child reading them on the living room
> > floor, I've never fully grasped the reasons why an encyclopedia was
> > not just a superset of the dictionary.
	[snip]
> But an encyclopedia tries to be somewhat independent of all this. It
> tries to split the world up into concepts that make sense from the
> point of view of our current state of knowledge. Those tails that have
> enough in common to be usefully described together should form one
> article, both in an English encyclopedia and an Icelandic one.

Maybe.  But while the structure of our language might not overwhelmingly
determine the thoughts that we can have in it (the infamous Sapir-Whorf
conjecture) it certainly determines which thoughts are easier to
communicate to readers of the same language.

It seems to me that the central difference between a dictionary and an
encyclopedia is that a dictionary is about the language, whereas an
encyclopedia is about the world.  A dictionary sets out not to describe
the world in which language-users live, but rather the language that
they use to describe that world.  So a dictionary entry on the words
"God" or "justice" does not need to discuss the issue of whether God
exists, or whether justice can be accomplished -- only with what people
_mean_ when they say or write "God" or "justice".

A dictionary uses language as meta-language:  that is, to describe the
language itself.  An encyclopedia uses language in the ordinary fashion:
to describe the world.

A dictionary, in defining the word "frog", must say that it is usually
used to mean a small amphibian, but also can mean a clothes fastener or
(as derogatory slang) a Frenchman.  An encyclopedia, however, is not in
the business of defining "frog", but in discussing the biology and
ecology of frogs.  The dictionary entry is about "frog", the word; the
encyclopedia article is about frogs, the animals.  Whenever definition
of the word is allowed to overshadow elucidation of the animal, the
encyclopedia starts to fail as an encyclopedia.

-- 
Karl A. Krueger <kkrueger at whoi.edu>