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- Hacker News
- I'm surprised to note -- if the discussion here is any evidence, then anger and literacy are inversely correlated.by Exoristos
- bravoby jpfromlondon
- I think there are tonnes of errors and repetition at the top of this essay. 'Glorious' repeats across two of the opening sentences, for example.
The title, combined with this, has provoked me into live-editing it.
I've turned on "anyone with the link can comment", and am using "suggest".
If you're interested, feel free to jump in:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GxprXLxbOlgaAQ2-IfYyk4zq...
There are lots of similarities between writing/editing prose and coding.
I think these become much more apparent when using version history / suggestion tools in word processors, especially collaboratively.
For editing long-form prose, especially fiction, word processing software is a long way behind git. This has always surprised me.
- For me there is only one rule of writing: Reader must enjoy reading what you wrote. They are ultimately the final judge - the very reason to write anything at all.
Anything else is just huffing your own farts for the kick of it. No matter how flowery the words are in your book or how intricate nuances of language. Such things can be outright counterproductive.
by juleiie - That's still bad advice. Sometimes writing is just useful, not enjoyable.by breezybottom
- Some people enjoy reading flowery words and intricately nuanced language; those who enjoy writing in that style should continue to do so, and reap the rewards of a similarly inclined audience.by kmoser
- English prose is one of those things I never quite got well; I grew up having read different versions of the Bible (like King James), old English versions of books, and found it to more "overtly wordy" (found it funny to imagine people talking like that about grocery shopping). I am curious how prose may change in 20-30 years given how cemented internet/social media talk becomes the norm, as well AI (and however education goes during that time). I agree with the author on some points but it depends on the material and subject matter where each matters.by tolugenius
- So much hate for this piece in the thread, I'm seeing almost no positive comments. I'm tempted to be unkind, but will exercise restraint; we are here, for the most part, technical writers, for whom parsimony is a professional virtue.
I loved it.
We're in an age where matrix multiplication can yawn out endless passages of trite, dull, sludge. The author, to my mind, makes a powerful and inspiring case for a future for human-written prose. The ability to effectively and creatively deploy a rich and complex vocabulary is the flex (in the parlance of our times) that distinguishes the craftsmen from the clankers.
by specproc - The issue I have with it is that it seems gratuitous, intended to impress - not that far from the edgy teenager who’s just discovered a thesaurus. Even the choice of passages he admires seems to fit that description.
Any reader is likely to come across passages that really speak to them at some point, but to raise that to “One really would have to have a miserly spirit not to love both” is just… sophomoric.
And if you think that “clankers” (such a silly, misapplied, childish term) somehow aren’t going to be capable of producing such prose, I have bad news for you.
by antonvs - This person - gets itby starkshift
- We are fortunate that this individual's stylistic perspective is out there adding spice and variety to the world. I think, however, that most of us would be ill-advised to emulate it.
Orwell's maxim, "never use a long word when a short one will do", is something the best writers have always freely ignored. But it's a reliable guardrail for the writer of merely average skill, steering them toward something passable rather than vomit-inducing.
by skobes - As a production editor at a uni press, who has to occasionally translate jargon into English, I find Orwell's essay to still be entirely relevant. The kinds of writing Orwell warned about still flourishes in the pablum emails we get from HR, the management reports with roundabout justifications for more layoffs, the political speeches that use a lot of words to say nothing. I just had a manuscript where the author was very fond of using trite filler phrases that added very little. It kind of made me miss the days of red pencils, a somewhat more satisfying way of cutting.
Strunk & White, I have to agree, is mostly not very useful.
by Finnucane - His em-dash usage is not clearly defined and distinct from other punctuation marks, it introduces a fair amount of unintended ambiguity. It is easy enough to understand but a few times I had to stop and try and figure out if there was some nuance and intent behind it all.
>And—well, here,
That was especially egregious. And! but—well, here, I guess, if I had to guess—which I don't(but I will)—the purpose of his essay seems to be, that; unintended ambiguity is good and really quite nice from an aesthetic standpoint. David Bently Hart seems to be the anti-McCarthy and falls into all the same traps as McCarthy, just walks into them backwards and blindfolded through a parentheses and a digression instead of jumping in head first.
by ofalkaed - 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.
by Animats - 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.
by hecreto - 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.
by tigerlily - The modern response to baroque text is "mucho texto" jpeg with a gangster Yodaby orphereus
said Oscar Wilde with eyebrow raised toward Webster, Strunk and White.'We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.'Apparently this struck a chord in mid-Atlantic anglophiles, forcing an era of bleating on about ol' Blighty.
by defrost- 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.by taylorius
- 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).by jacobolus
- 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".
- > 8. If you must choose between elegance and perfect clarity, allow yourself a period of decorously agonized indecision, and then always choose elegance.
I believe that this may be true of prose (it depends on the style of the author and the nature of what's being written,) but that it's untrue of every other form of written communication, and acclaimed prose stylists are often very poor letter-writers for just this reason. In writing non-prose, I find that there are only two rules:
1. Be as clear as possible.
2. Be as brief as possible, but do not veer into the intentionally laconic or abbreviated.
I also am absolutely certain that attempting to attain maximal elegance is a trap that leads directly to purple prose, to works of literature that cannot naturally be read out loud, and to other unfortunate outcomes.
by A_D_E_P_T - Look, I am in no position to seriously critique the author’s writing. He clearly has linguistic chops. But what kind of bunk is this? We get it, the flowery, overdrawn language of yore is more expressive. But that kind of writing gets in its own way. Words seem to trump concept. But reading that sort of writing feels like being in a museum; sure that Victorian gown looks pretty but does anyone actually want to wear it?
And then, while arguing against monotony, this piece spends all its time repeating the same structure: a ten-dollar adjective followed by a ten-dollar noun. Ironically, the five passages cited as “good writing” mostly avoid the wordiness that the piece spends all its time arguing for.
> Do not use a thesaurus.
Oh now he’s just taking the piss.
by doodaddy - Simple words can create beautiful and precise prose, even that is lost today.by jpfromlondon
- To be fair, even if I have to look up half the words in the post to understand what he's trying to say, 'Do not use a thesaurus' still has weight - it's one thing to already know the perfect word for what you're trying to say (even if many others don't know that word), but another to decide on a whim that a given word should be replaced with a more 'advanced' alternative without knowing what you'll find or understanding the nuances of your pick.by loopmonster
- Kept out of sight in this rogue essay is the classic question: Who's your audience?
If you're writing for yourself (and maybe a very small number of equally erudite readers) cut loose! Embrace "anfractuous density and heedless flamboyance." But if you're trying to change people's minds, or share knowledge widely, everything in this essay is defiantly at odds with what's necessary to get the rest of the world to pay attention.
by GCA10 - That is the exact line where I stopped reading the articleby omeysalvi
- Ultracrepidarian!by starkshift
- I agree that it has been left to the reader to infer, but then again this is not really a how-to guide!
And he gestures at the need for this at least once.
To be able to balance expressiveness and reticence, or to know when to cast that balance away, requires tact and ingenuity and taste on the part of writersby hydrox24 - Kept out of sight in this dismissive comment is the pressing question: What year is it?
Up until four years ago, your notion of "what's necessary" was the law of the land. Starting from sometime around Hemingway, we produced a century's worth of flattened, easy-reading slop, and much knowledge was shared very widely. There was a certain art to the blandness. (One notable master of that art is pg, the creator of this website.)
Then we fed that slop into a giant machine that makes it trivial for anyone and everyone to produce that sort of generic writing. If you want to change minds and differentiate yourself now, you can't just do the old flat style anymore. You have to set yourself apart somehow, and you can start by loving the craft of writing again.
The people who matter will read it and love it. Everybody else can take what you wrote, dump it into the slop machine, and rearrange it into something they find easier to read.
by arduanika