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Comment by sbjs | Hacker News Reader

"When we are not actually holding them, books are things over which we like to wring our hands. They stand, in their very solidity, for what might be precarious and endangered in our brave newish world."

Definitely an off topic question, but why is this kind of writing style so common? This super academic style that uses the most complicated and unnatural phrases, and likes to use esoteric definitions of otherwise normal words. It's hard for me to read and it just gives off a vibe of show-off-y-ness.

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It's funny: I was actually prepared to _defend_ this article based on the first line you quoted above. But the rest of it is much, much worse.

I have no objection at all to long, complex sentences. Not everything needs to be (or can be) distilled into bullet points. But I'm struggling to find enough substance in this book review to merit the epic academic writing.

I'm not saying there _isn't_ an interesting idea buried in there somewhere, but:

> "Rather than seeing time as a scarce, homogeneous resource to be economized or optimized, Lupton invites us to follow her in seeing books as things that introduce difference, discontinuity, and even plasticity into time itself."

Statements to this effect are made several times as if merely repeating it in different, increasingly obfuscated ways makes a stronger point. It does not.

And:

> "Lupton defines the literary, which is the category to which she remains professionally tethered, as a mode of thought characterized by refusing linear or instrumental time use."

Really?

Agreed. The headline is much bolder and more engaging than the actual article.

I'll take a moment to sputter about the phrase "even plasticity." It sounds stark and assertive. But then I check the dictionary and discover that plasticity is really just a $10 word for the more mundane "malleable."

In that case, the sentence is wrongly constructed. If it's trying to take us up a crescendo from small changes to big ones, it should read "introduce plasticity, difference and even discontinuity into time itself."

I'm being cranky to make a larger point. A lot of academic writing isn't just obscure. It's intellectually sloppy in the way that a badly constructed sermon can be, too. Words are sloshed into place mostly because of the way they sound, rather than careful consideration of their exact meaning.

What? No! One is a noun and the other is an adjective. Do you really want to replace "plasticity" with "malleability"? Or maybe you prefer "malleableness"?

But yes I agree that the writing doesn't flow well. This required a great deal of editing, which it didn't receive. In this particular sentence, the worst offender is "itself". We know we're talking about time; it dominates the first clause of the sentence.

I don't like the sentence and I'm not even sure what it means to introduce difference into time. But to me the idea of malleable time is the bigger, more surprising concept compared to mere discontinuity which is commonplace.

Apart from being a functional mechanism for communicating ideas, writing can also be artistic and stylistic. Writing can be a form of self expression. Like drawing, writing can express itself in both imitative and impressionistic forms. Or anywhere in between.

Sure. But when the stylistic goes overboard, it can get in the way of actually communicating ideas. If the author wants to express their style more than they want to communicate, that's their choice, but it is at the price of communication. In particular, I'm not going to bother to read very much of it...

It's as if different people have different preferences.

I've observed that many people don't like Faulkner, and others don't like Hemingway. I aim for Hemingway with my technical writing, but I love reading Faulkner for pleasure.

Sure, that's true. This article wasn't fiction, though.

And I know that non-fiction can still have style (in fact, the best does), and people can still have different preferences for that style. And fiction can still communicate ideas.

But for me, personally, if you're trying to communicate an idea, tell me the idea. Stop trying to dress it up in fancy writing, and making me guess whether there's something profound there, or whether it's just fancy. Have style if you want, but don't let the style get in the way of actually communicating the idea.

Some modern artists sacrifice communication when they produce works that I don't understand and don't find aesthetically pleasing enough to study. I guess taste is just one of the pitfalls of style.

Compensation per word?

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