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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

This guy hates Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, the famous "omit needless words" book. He's plugging for a baroque style that would be unreadable today.

We do have baroque styles today, but they're different from classical baroque literature. They're the postings that start with a bio and cover the author's hobbies before getting to the point, perhaps including an anecdote from the author's past. There are writers who can make that interesting, and you can read them in the New Yorker. But the serious magazines have editors. In blog postings, you're reading the slush pile.

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It might just be me, but I find his baroque style very readable. Despite using a vocabulary much broader than mine (irritating but admirable), he at least seems to have read his prose aloud, and considered how it's meter makes its meaning fluent.

I agree that many writers fill their works with needless diversions and unnecessary expositions on their life that add nothing to their text, but this is different from a "baroque style".

Strunk and White promote all sorts of prescriptivist nonsense, taking arbitrary personal preferences and elevating them to sacred rules (including many which they themselves constantly violate because they don't accord with idiomatic English).

I think Baroque is the wrong descriptor for those passages actually. The constructions employed in both are very varied, its true, and the vocabulary is wide, not to mention archaic to our modern ears - but all the words are performing a useful function in conveying what the author wanted to say. There is not much pointless ornamentation.

  'We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.'

said Oscar Wilde with eyebrow raised toward Webster, Strunk and White.

Apparently this struck a chord in mid-Atlantic anglophiles, forcing an era of bleating on about ol' Blighty.

The modern response to baroque text is "mucho texto" jpeg with a gangster Yoda

I can't remember who, but someone definitely said "if you want to write, you must first fill a chest with writing, then lock that chest, take out a blank sheet and then you can begin".

TFA as well as many other works of blog, belong in that chest.

Lest that comment be misconstrued for what sister comments frame as anger (are they not merely nonplussed?), I am happy for the writing to be. Except that all good writing is edited.

Presently I am reading Hilary Mantel, an exemplary prose writer of the highest merit, so I trust you'll forgive me my Jeevesian dismay at style of The Florid Article.

There are a handful of these every day on the front page. It is very jarring when they suddenly shift topics completely, using some vaguely tangential connection between what they started with, and the vapid thing they want to write about. Honestly - it’s wankery.

Here’s one I just came across: https://asteriskmag.com/issues/15/rust-and-boll

And there are plenty of others.

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