This thing of having one or two long paragraphs of rambling text before the writer actually gets to the point is something I find annoying.
It is so common nowadays that I find myself automatically skipping the first paragraph altogether.
It is so common nowadays that I find myself automatically skipping the first paragraph altogether.
I've recently been reading essays by G.K Chesteron and William Hazlitt. They are incredibly verbose by modern standards. They spend many long sentences teasing out shades of meaning and subtle implications. They take extremely long run-ups to their topic, often starting with several paragraphs on something that seems unrelated before cleverly integrating it into the main thesis. Instead of clearly stating a thesis and arguing for it, they often layer related concepts and arguments, and they expect the reader to figure out the associations, analogies, and references. But both writers are widely acknowledged to been masters of prose style
Some people appreciate "a fancy prose style" in the same way they appreciate complex music. It's more about using language and argument to craft something intricate and elegant than a plain information dump.