This seems like a perfect example of someone who needs to read pg’s essay “write like you talk”: http://paulgraham.com/talk.html
I don’t get an intelligence vibe from this style of writing - it mostly just sets off my bullshit alarms.
I don’t get an intelligence vibe from this style of writing - it mostly just sets off my bullshit alarms.
https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm
As for the particular author, he was born in another culture (not all cultures appreciate the matter-of-factness as-you-talk anglo-saxon style of writing, many prominent European writers have called it "barbaric" and "only good for business"). He was also born in a whole other era.
Snobs in general tend to look down on people who don’t place value on pomposity for its own sake.
Okay, but they'd also probably be able to understand it. So, tradeoffs.
You seem to think that it’s impossible for prose to be aesthetically pleasing and comprehensible at the same time. But in fact, the quoted text is both. If it had been written in a plainer style, I probably wouldn't have bothered reading all of it. So no trade off in this instance.
At no point did I say it's literally impossible to read.
I really don't think you can have it both ways on this one. If, contrary to what you've been suggesting, the style only has a minor impact on your ability to understand what is being said, then what's the issue? Why get so worked up about the fact that some esoteric French alchemist writing in 1929 isn't writing in the journalistic style that's currently in vogue?
There's a wide spectrum between "easy to understand" and "literally impossible to understand". Everything to the left of "literally impossible to understand" can be understood (at least in part). That doesn't mean the effort is low. Hell, I can "understand" German but I'm going to spend a lot of time translating words I don't know.
Why are you so worked up about someone online doesn't share your love of flowery prose that you're willing to engage in borderline trolling to piss them off? Personally I don't care about Fulcanelli and had never heard of him before today. I do care about general quality of writing because I'm exposed to it constantly.
As to why I'm worked up: you're expressing so much disdain for any piece of writing that doesn't give you exactly what you want in exactly the form that you want it. A big part of a humanities education used to be forcing people to read lots of pieces of writing that don't meet that description. I think that was broadly a good thing. Reading shouldn't be a purely transactional activity.
Let’s be honest. You are not worked up because of my disdain for this piece or for flowery writing in general. You don’t care about me, nor should you. You are worked up because someone has the audacity to not hold the same opinion as you. It’s not possible to simply have differing opinions, especially if there’s a compelling argument for not-your-opinion, so the only possible reality is that they are wrong, wrong, wrong. So you’ll reply to every comment they make, even if it’s not to you, and you’ll argue irrelevant tangents and willfully misinterpret what they said and intentionally try to goad them to anger to prove that you are the one who’s right. Good luck with that.
"Spoken writing" can be just as artificial and pretentious -- e.g. upper class writers writing as if they grew up in da hood. Or people dumbing down their language to sell more.
How we speak with a friend, and how we write, doesn't have to share the same language or tone or expressions or vocabulary even. Spoken is a stream of consciousness that we express in real time. Written is forever, so we have time to refine what we write, go deeper, be more artistic, add flourishes, and so on. This is not the same as "being obscure for being obscure's sake".
To make an analogy, what you ask for, in photography terms would be "all photography should be real life documentary-style scenes".
In fact, even "spoken" changes form all the time: you don't talk to your bong buddy the same as you talk to your parents, or spouse, or the same way you give a lecture as when you casual chat over coffee, or when you teach students. Tone changes, expression changes, vocabulary changes, level of difficulty changes, etc.
That in itself is snobbery. It's just fashion bouncing back and forth between hating on the poor and hating on the rich. One is fashionable until everyone does it then the opposite is in vogue.
Are the cool kids today wearing factory-ripped jeans these days or are they hating on people who do?
It is just stupid to say "this style is the only acceptable style and anyone doing anything different is an asshole". Surface quality is boring, substance is important.
It isn't stupid. It's snobbery. If you denigrate straightforward writing as "barbaric", you're a snob, plain and simple.
> Surface quality is boring, substance is important.
My problem with overly-flowery writing is specifically that it's about style and not substance. If your goal is to educate or to entertain, put that first. If your goal is to impress the reader with your loquacious conveyance of verbiage, fine, but you're sacrificing substance for style. And I personally think this sort of writing shows a disrespect toward the reader, because it's literally about the author showing off and trying to impress the reader.
You know how sometimes you'll go to a website and it hijacks your scrollbar to show some unnecessary visualization or a gratuitous rotating 3D view of a product? And you look at it and you can appreciate the artistry that went into creating the visualization, the skill that went into rendering everything perfectly and syncing it with the scrollbar. But mostly it's fucking obnoxious because you just want to scroll down to read the article or click the "buy" link and instead you're wasting your time fighting with the site that broke your scrollbar because some product manager was sure you'd be impressed. This is the website version of dense, flowery, self-important prose.
It's "straightforward" for you and your era and culture. For others it's merely a plain and crude version of what could be better writing.
There is the snobbery. Bad writing is everywhere. Some people have large vocabularies and use them well, some people don't. Becoming a good writer also requires a lot of bad writing. Complex writing more so. If you say everything complex is just about style and showing off, it reflects poorly on your ability to determine quality of complex, or any writing.
There is nothing wrong with not understanding something or having no interest in something, but doing this virtue signaling to put yourself above anything you don't understand is anti-intellectual bullshit and you might as well be protesting against vaccines. It's the same as black kids shaming each other for "talking white" or people yelling about how "we speak English in this country".
If you don't like to listen to bubblegum pop, that doesn't make you a snob. If you argue that the lyrics are simple and the repetitive beats basic chord progressions are unoriginal or pandering to the crowd, that still doesn't make you a snob. But if you say that anyone who makes or listens to bubblegum pop is an idiot, now you're a snob. Snobbery isn't disliking something. It's looking down on something (or more practically on people who like that something.)
I don't think people who write flowery, dense prose are all snobs, nor did I say that they were. I said the ones who do this and then call straightforward writing "barbaric" are snobs, because "barbaric" is not a meaningful criticism, any more than "idiotic" is.
I gave you specific reasons I do not like the flowery style of writing, and why I find it counterproductive. I think writing in this way is very self-important and I think it puts the reader secondary to the author's ego. I think flowery writing has poor fit for purpose, if the purpose is to educate or even entertain. If the purpose is to demonstrate artistry in sentence composition, then sure, flowery writing seems great for that purpose, but I personally have zero interest in that purpose, and I think most people probably have zero interest in that. Slogging through three times as much text and reading every paragraph twice to make sure I understood the point is not a rewarding experience for me.
Besides, for many people there's nothing wrong with what some call "snobbery" but they call elitism or quality or high brow, etc.
They're not "snobs" caring who has this or that ancestry, who has expensive clothes, etc., but particular about language, expression, etc. Which is par for the course of being a writer, artist, or intellectual in general.
For example, to use the English versions of French words...
To say "I'm sorry" in French you say "I am desolate"
Talking about a broken phone or a stomach ache you would say they are deranged.
Much of French vocabulary came into English but very often with some distance in meanings and usage. Often in translating you have the option to use exactly the same word with maybe a small spelling change, but you end up sounding ridiculous because of the shift in meaning or intensity.
Second, essentially what boils down to shaming people for not communicating the way you want is wrong. Not that I am saying you are directly or intentionally harassing someone, but (despite my distaste for how it is often used) things like this could be called microaggressions, making people uncomfortable using their language.
I experienced a lot of that growing up. In a place far from cities where people were generally less educated (and those that were left to find jobs) and I read a lot. I still struggle with the unconscious bias that people don't want to hear what I have to say or wouldn't understand or would respond with discouraging things.
Looking back, I'm not trying to say you are doing anything particularly negative, BUT be careful. Diversity can come in lots of ways, using language a little differently is one of them, and a little understanding (like how hundred year translations from French are going to sound a little … florid) helps with perspective.
No. It's not always wrong.
Which is exactly what the second half of your post is, but moreso than the person you are criticizing.
There is no point in having a discussion board if people are going to be criticized because something they said with sincerity might offend somebody. That is the nature of speech.
As to your second point, that any speech at all might offend someone so there's no point in drawing attention to that fact, on the contrary, the commenter is actually making a very concrete point. He is talking about a very specific thing, that this prescriptivism about writing style alienates and turns away a lot of people that could otherwise make valuable contributions. It's not a general statement that any statement might offend somebody, but a highly targeted examination of the consequences of such speech policing.
Except for pronunciation! ;)
And lord forbid us for writing in a way or about subjects that don't please as much of the potential readers as possible. They might not click on our data-mined ads if we did. The fucks.
I’d guess there were people that valued this in most times and cultures.
You may have a preference for purple prose, but it's silly to pretend that the quoted text is clear.
I'm suspicious when people write like that because it can be used to hide bad reasoning behind unnecessarily complex word choice and sentence structure. If you care about sharing ideas it's better to write simply.
> If you care about sharing ideas it's better to write simply.
That's good advice if you're writing blog posts in 2019 with the goal of driving traffic to your site. And why should any writer aspire to a higher goal than that?
For you, and the culture you’re in, what you say is true. It is far from universal.
I’d be willing to bet that simpler is generally easier to understand than complex. Maybe some exceptions exist, but I’d suspect they’d be outliers.
Though going back to the first comment it’s also not how people talk.
If your goal is to communicate your company or product; sure, keep it simple. But that's not everyone's goals, irrespective of culture or time period.
As for the translation, I’m not clear when this was actually translated. The stuff I’ve found indicates a publishing date if 1999. If that’s accurate (and it well may not be) then I think it’s entirely reasonable to expect translators to write easy-to-read text in a modern style. I understand the desire to carry the “spirit” of the work through the translation, but I’m not sure that’s what’s at fault when translations read this way. I wonder if translators enamored with the work are trying to use difficult phrasing to make it seem more impressive or educated. I also wonder if sometimes native sentence structure is being replicated in English, where it comes off try-hard when it’s really just an awkward transliteration.
It's not meant to be a list of purely literal facts. It's entertaining and a pleasure to read.
As for Paul Graham's opinion piece; well, that's just silly. Something written is inherently different to something spoken; they have different strengths, different attributes, different purposes and, should they have the same goal, can best achieve that goal in different ways. Why choose to discard the strengths of the written?
As a writing exercise, let me re-write the piece:
"What happened during the Middle Ages is unclear and the evidence we use to understand it is contradictory. Reviews depict the period as one filled with conflict and struggle, but artistic works dated to this period - from the calm, serene looking statues to the expansive, aspirational Gothic architecture - instead hint that they were created by happy people in a flourishing society.
Perhaps the lack of recorded history in this period is the result of peace and a lack of notable incidents rather than war, famine and disease."
The idea is interesting but bite-sized when stripped of the pomp.
Mmm... use of the word "nightmare" to criticise something that's discussing the dark ages, where the critique is about just that kind of skill level, but then you go on to present a junior grade summary. Deep troll or accidental writing ability? Too close to call.
But that illuminates a fundmental part of the problem here. To many on both sides of the page, much writing is also a game, to be played by the reader and the author. It's meant to be fun, but if one doesn't realise it's a game to be played and that the game is itself another layer of meaning, one will simply end up getting annoyed, wondering why the author didn't just present a plain list of unadorned facts.
By all means, don't play the game if you don't want to, or critique the game as one plays - point out literary shots that didn't get over the line, or cross-language allusions that are playing a bit fast and loose with etymology.
But to see the game being played and tell people to stop playing it? That's not right.
The original paragraph was: "Paradoxical in its manifestations, disconcerting in its signs, the Middle Ages proposes to the sagacity of its admirers the resolution of a singular misconception. How to reconcile the unreconcilable? How to adjust the testimony of the historical facts to that of medieval art works?"
This paragraph is obfuscated at best, unintelligible at worst. This is a fairly common writing style in continental philosophy, and in that field the debate isn't whether or not the writing is bad. It's whether or not the writing is intentionally bad.
The Dwellings if Philosophers (as translated) starts out with “Paradoxical in its manifestations, disconcerting in its signs, the Middle Ages proposes to the sagacity of its admirers the resolution of a singular misconception.” This says so little with such absurd wording that it’s almost word soup.
Now if you're going to argue all Latin-based and Romance languages are less straightforward than English, that's a riskier (and dismissive!) proposition.
(I'm not a native speaker either, though.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19741886
>60% reduction in content for a single off-the-cuff rewrite implies the original work needs an aggressive editor with an aggressive amount of red ink.
In any case, the original doesn't set off my "bullshit detectors". Such an aggressive way of commenting on a piece of writing! Not everyone must or should write like Hemingway -- not even Hemingway!
You really don't seem able to take a book on its own terms. This book wasn't written to give you personally exactly what you want from a book. Just because you want to read pages of dense logical argumentation in flat prose doesn't mean that you can fault every author who writes a different kind of book.
It may not be ideal for other goals, including maximizing utility of your work (or persuasiveness z for persuasive writing) to people who do read it. Different forms of expression between writing and speech, which differences are also different by purposes and intended audience of the writing, have evolved for real reasons.
Also, it's funny to track the biographies of the most commonly known Occultists; Crowley, Dee, Parsons - all accomplished before they got into the occult, and declining after.
That is, if I can improve my writing significantly...