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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

That’s good advice but it’s also highly dependent on culture and time. It’s food advice because the English-speaking culture of today values writing that sounds like speech. It may not have been good advice at all for someone writing in 1920s France. And beyond that, it’s really hard to apply this sort of advice to a translation.

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Yeah, written English corresponds to spoken English more than in a lot of other languages, where the vocabulary and grammar can vary considerably between the written and spoken word.

> written English corresponds to spoken English more than in a lot of other languages

Except for pronunciation! ;)

> It’s food advice because the English-speaking culture of today values writing that sounds like speech.

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 argue it’s good advice for people that value clarity over sounding smart.

I’d guess there were people that valued this in most times and cultures.

The quoted text isn't at all unclear (especially taking into consideration the fact that it's a translation).

The quoted text is verbose and tedious. It uses a lot of complex words to convey little information, both of these things negatively affect clarity.

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.

That's a very absolutist take on it. I genuinely don't find the text difficult to read or light on information. In fact I think it makes a very interesting point. You've also got to take into account that it's a translation of a French text written almost 100 years ago.

> 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?

Can you point to an example of purple prose in the text? I'm curious because I don't see any.

Someone in another time and place may well find complex word choice and sentence structure easiest to understand in written form, and is wary of writing that uses plain language because it can be used to hide bad reasoning behind simple-sounding words and sentence structure.

For you, and the culture you’re in, what you say is true. It is far from universal.

I guess I don’t agree.

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.

How much do you suppose a person would get out of Up Goer Five if they didn’t already know about Apollo and such?

That’s fair - at the extreme end it is probably harder to understand.

Though going back to the first comment it’s also not how people talk.

Writing that is intentionally eloquent, clever, intricate, etc. isn't inherently bad and most certainly need not adhere to the gospel of some arbitrary Venture Capitalist in silicon valley.

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.

Yes and no. It’s valid that values change and perhaps in the past this sort of dense, self-important prose was the preferred way to write. No doubt many even today would say it sounds more intelligent or educated. However, if the goal is to write in a legible, understandable, comprehensible way, then this has never been a good way to do that. (Indeed, many scholarly works are still written this way, and they are far less accessible as a result. People might feel smarter for reading them but they probably get less from them than if they were written simply.)

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.

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