For example, writing out words instead of using symbols is easier to understand at first glance, but it's much harder to skim (even after becoming familiar with the language). SQL is a really hard language to skim. Of course, the opposite end of the spectrum (C is close) is also hard to skim.
I like the idea that most of the words that someone sees in a program are words in the domain of the program itself — its nouns and verbs — and not words in the domain of the underlying implementation language.
For example, though I visually like the way Ruby's "begin" and "end" look for delimiters, I think braces are better in that they reduce the "word clutter" of the code.
You can probably take this too far. I wouldn't want to use punctuation for control flow. But perhaps that's an argument that, like Smalltalk, control flow should be an API and not built in syntax.
I prefer Erlang's approach: dispense with the words and the braces. Unfortunately Elixir decided words were friendlier.