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Comment by AnimalMuppet | Hacker News Reader

There's been a style change. People used to be impressed by high-sounding prose. Writing the way he favors impressed.

But things changed, and now people suspect that it's a smokescreen to hide BS behind. The present style is for clarity rather than impressiveness.

Interestingly, the article itself displays the problem. It tries to hard to have the impressive style. That style gets in the way of actually saying something. (In the end, the article does in fact say something. But the style makes it harder to wade through. Instead of "trying to get readers to reach higher", it becomes "selecting only those readers who are willing to put up with that", which is not the same thing.)

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I was just thinking to myself the other day that the danger of actually taking the time to write something thoughtful and cogent the days is that once you have convinced the intelligent, open-minded readers, that leaves everyone else to write comments. Which means when people come to look at the article in the future, and skip to the comments to get a sense of what kind of reaction people had, they get precisely the wrong impression.

This is an interesting article. It's not a "think piece" about writing "these days". It's a serious attempt to understand just what "public intellectuals" were in the first place, what conditions made them possible, and what part of that, if any, can be revived, or is worth reviving.

He might be completely wrong. But he deserves a little better than TL;DR because he dared to write above the eighth grade level.

>now people suspect that it's a smokescreen to hide BS behind.

In fact, this is usually a good heuristic to tell whether someone is trying to get off the hook with saying nothing at all. Politicians love this. It's all about filling up the listener/reader's short term memory buffer and get them to lose track of what you were saying. Once you've done that you can basically loop for a pretty long time. Many are embarrassed enough of their mental limitations that they'll just pretend something important was said rather than confront the speaker or admit to themselves that they can't keep up.

That said, that kind of writing is gold when you're writing fiction with, say, Gaimanesque magic in it, because it allows you to be really woolly and create a sense of non-understanding and mystique.

Reminds me of the Catholic switch from Latin to local language, and from facing the altar to facing the assembly.

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