Controversial point, but PGs writing is F-.
It seems a lot of effort goes into sounding smart, rather then delivering information required.
Who learned anything from above?
It seems a lot of effort goes into sounding smart, rather then delivering information required.
Who learned anything from above?
The author seems to have expended great effort on terseness, writing in very short sentences which artificially forced him to start more of them with coordinate conjunctions than feels comfortable to me. It did not make for an easy read and all felt rather too self-conscious. Good writing should focus me on the ideas, not the annoying syntactic structure of the writing.
I didn't get on with it.
NASA deals with strength and precision together all the time, it's rare that they are both needed on the same task at the same level. The requirements for precision and strength to be shared in an essay is to construct sentences that are clear and cannot be interpreted in multiple ways and then fill in the descriptive detailing with precise information.
Strength takes from distilling multiple possible interpretations down into one clear and correct direction. Precision is about highlighting the qualitative properties and exact quantities of your subject.
They don't conflict. They are rarely needed together.
Three miles east of the center of South Carolina is almost accurate enough? Who knows, not accurate enough for NASA and accurate enough for giving coworkers the idea of where your farmland is located.
Didn't pg also have an essay on what an essay is and came to the conclusion that an essay is meant to explore a topic for oneself? But could also be that I read this somewhere else.
So, an essay is for the writer to explore stuff and have interested readers go along.
But useful writing is for the reader only. If pg had cut this essay to less than 500 words (and I bet this could've been done without losing information), it'd been a lot more useful, although probably not an "essay" anymore.