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Comment by evo_9 | Hacker News Reader

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evo_9·

I find articles on New Yorker to be over-written to the point of distraction.

I ran this story through Hemingway-App to get some stats:

"77 adverbs. Aim for 26 or fewer.

37 uses of passive voice, meeting the goal of 88 or fewer.

8 phrases have simpler alternatives.

52 of 439 sentences are hard to read.

70 of 439 sentences are very hard to read."

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This has been a bone of contention since the Gilded Age, when the problem was that New Yorker writers tended to write "Germanically", the verb of every run-on sentence always at the end putting.

Anecdata: I found your joke sentence more pleasant in the "cognitive ease" way. I am Germanophone.^ ^

I don't doubt you may have a point in general, but this article in particular is challenging material. Period. If it was much easier to read, I would become suspicious.

Be suspicious.

In the V.R. game Surgeon Simulator, players use power drills, bone saws, and other tools to vivisect a humanoid alien that writhes in pain on the operating table. As in most V.R. video games, players in Kitchen and Surgeon Simulator move in fanciful ways and are, at best, semi-embodied.

In this case the verbiage seems like a cover for ignorance of the subject matter.

And also ignorance of the difference between pain and some animation.

It's probably a nice guideline but IMHO an article doesn't have to be perfectly digestable. Maybe if you overoptimize it, it becomes somehow a robotic experience both for author and reader.

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