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Comment by marcuskaz | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, but he takes it too far. McCarthy's omission of punctuation makes his books difficult to understand who is saying what, and a challenge to follow especially with dialogue. The Road and No Country for Old Men both do not contain quotation marks for speech, and he omits the common speech tags like "he said" or "she exclaimed" which makes it a challenge to know who is saying what. It is a choice and the art form he's choosing, but is far from writing for clarity.

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I would assume that his suggestions for clarity in "scientific papers" and his literary style don't overlap all that much to infer the former from the later.

> the former from the later

my writing advice:

never use the former and the latter

Does it make me sound pretentious? That's fine, we're debating literary styles after all. :D

no, it's just a stylistic pet peeve of mine. lacks specificity and always makes me have to think about which is the latter and which is the former, no matter how many times i look it up. scrambles my brain.

This is certainly the case, but it does make it all the more amusing that the myth

> Commas denote a pause in speaking.... Speak the sentence aloud to find pauses.

made its way into this article. Hard to imagine that this particular point, to which I might attribute many of the comma splices I see in scientific writing, actually came from a professional writer.

McCarthy's books involve unrelenting violence. If he viewed commas as pauses, it makes sense that he would never use them.

It goes without saying that you're a better writer than Cormac McCarthy. Tell us something beyond that.

The implication was that likely not all of the advice in this article, which was written by biologists, is actually attributable to McCarthy.

I recently read Blood Meridian, the only one of his books I've read. I agree this was a bit jarring and confusing at the start, but I got used to it by the end.

Though I haven't read any scientific papers, so can't comment on those.

I agree about clarity, so this is just an aside but that's what makes it a fun experience for me. It's unlike reading anyone else (although I haven't read many authors). I'd say no country for old men was still pretty straightforward, but I had to re-read sentences and whole paragraphs with blood meridian.

The work makes it worth it, makes it that much more rewarding to me personally. It's like choosing to play a difficult videogame, because you know once you overcome it, it'll be great.

I agree, his literary work is unique, and does take a bit more work to read, and with that it includes additional meaning behind it. For example, in The Road often times it doesn't even matter if its the boy or the man saying it.

However, I wouldn't take his advice on how to write for clarity. I too often found myself rereading paragraph, "wait is this description or dialogue", "who said that" - this is not what you want in scientific papers

> The Road and No Country for Old Men both do not contain quotation marks for speech, and he omits the common speech tags like "he said" or "she exclaimed" which makes it a challenge to know who is saying what.

I am reading NC4OM right now and this is not, technically, the case. He does use those “speech tags”.

technical writing and fiction writing are two totally different forms of writing. the ability to modulate between those disciplines is the sign of a good writer.

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