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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

I taught English as a foreign language in Brazil for several years, and at the intermediate level students would begin writing essays.

At the advanced level, I would teach about run-on sentences and how they're bad, and the class would always become tremendously confused. Finally I talked to one of the Brazilian teachers, asking why run-on sentences were such a difficult concept for my students to get.

He explained that in Brazil, long, complex, strung-together sentences are considered good writing -- that the more work they are to put together, the smarter they show the writer is, and the fact that they take more work to read is the reader's problem, not the writer's! Simple, easily digestible sentences are the mark of an uneducated writer.

So if I ever turned in a paper with sentence structure like the introduction to the Declaration, I'd probably have points taken off here in the US, yet it would be fine writing in Brazil...

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Related to that, here's an observation about English vs. German writing:

English has a huge vocabulary, so educated authors show their mettle by using "big words": the one word from amongst all the approximately 600,000 English words that precisely fits the meaning they seek. (If it has Latin or French roots, so much the better...)

The German vocabulary is estimated at about half of its English counterpart. However, the grammar is quite a bit more complex. So if a German author wants to show off his learning, he does so by utilising the whole spectrum of grammatical constructs to find just the right inflection for what he wants to say. He proves his mastery not primarily by the wealth of his vocabulary, but by his command of the syntax.

(OK, that last sentence was probably superfluous. But it was too fun to exclude ;-) )

A (not necessarily original) example would be nice.

Here's a passage from Dawkins' "The Greatest Show on Earth":

"As we look back on the history of life, we see a picture of never-ending, ever-rejuvenating novelty. Individuals die; species, families orders and even classes go extinct. But the evolutionary process itself seems to pick itself up and resume its recurrent flowering, with undiminished freshness, with unabated youthfulness, as epoch gives way to epoch."

And a passage from Brecht's "Leben des Galilei":

"Eine Menschheit, stolpernd in diesem tausendjährigen Perlmutterdunst von Aberglaube und alten Wörtern, zu unwissend, ihre eigenen Kräfte voll zu entfalten, wird nicht fähig sein, die Kräfte der Natur zu entfalten, die Ihr enthüllt. Woführ arbeitet Ihr? Ich halte dafür, dass das einzige Ziel der Wissenschaft darin besteht, die Mühseligkeit der menschlichen Existenz zu erleichtern."

I realize that those excerpts are from two different genres, but perhaps they will serve as example. Of course, English writers do not rely exclusively on vocabulary to create good style, just as Germans do not shun all big words. But in general, writers will try to capitalize on the strengths of their respective languages.

This appears to be a recent development in English writing, perhaps related to Americans' fondness for directness over pretense as well as accessibility to all socioeconomic classes. In the past, more words were often viewed as better; Charles Dickens, in particular, is sometimes singled out and mocked by modern writers for his tendency to ramble. It extended to the names people chose for their characters; in Ian Fleming's time, long pretentious names like "Percival Aloysius Merriwether IV" and so forth were the norm in popular literature. Fleming looked down at a book of ornithology and saw just the sort of short, nondescript name his faceless hero needed: James Bond.

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