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The best way to write to convey meaning is to be as absolutely clear as possible, whether you are writing esoteric scientific papers or mass market non-fiction.

The best way to write to convey meaning is to be as absolutely clear as possible, whether you are writing esoteric scientific papers or mass market non-fiction. This is why Yuval Noah is such a popular author - he takes complex subjects and makes them easy to understand without losing their meaning. Literature may be different, but I still prefer fiction that tells its story without me having to scratch my head for hours.

JadeNB 8y ago
> The best way to write to convey meaning is to be as absolutely clear as possible, whether you are writing esoteric scientific papers or mass market non-fiction. I agree with this, except that I think that it is important to understand the caveat "as possible". It may be (I assert, though some argue) that the absolute clearest possible way to express something is not very clear. > This is why Yuval Noah is such a popular author - he takes complex subjects and makes them easy to understand without losing their meaning. I take issue with the idea that evidence for the best kind of writing is adduced from the popularity of that writing; I think that popular writing can be bad, and (perhaps less commonly) good writing can be unpopular. Nonetheless I think that the end of your sentence expresses the important idea very well: "… without losing their meaning." I think that there is too much of a trend in modern expositions to achieve the appearance of clarity and accessibility by dumbing down subjects enough to give readers only the feeling of understanding—which is not only probably bad on its own, but can also make the same readers resistant to later learning the subtleties, because discussing them sacrifices what they see as the clarity and accessibility of their preferred (incomplete) exposition.
madhadron 8y ago
Conveying meaning as clearly as possible implies direct, simple prose when you assume the reader shares a language game (per Wittgenstein) with you. Thus a theoretical physicist can communicate a fact about field theories to a colleague very directly, but that communication is hardly clear to a layman. What do you do if what you are working on is meaning that doesn't fit the usual language game, and part of the work is seeing what varying the language game can do to meaning? Then there is no direct prose. There is a fabrication of an artifact that leads the reader experientially to this new language game in all its nuance.
matwood 8y ago
> The best way to write to convey meaning is to be as absolutely clear as possible Agreed. Clear and concise writing hard, and takes time. The writer needs to revise, revise, and revise again. There is a great anecdote in "On Writing Well" where the author remembers taking students first drafts and telling them to cut them in half.

JadeNB 8y ago

> The best way to write to convey meaning is to be as absolutely clear as possible, whether you are writing esoteric scientific papers or mass market non-fiction. I agree with this, except that I think that it is important to understand the caveat "as possible". It may be (I assert, though some argue) that the absolute clearest possible way to express something is not very clear. > This is why Yuval Noah is such a popular author - he takes complex subjects and makes them easy to understand without losing their meaning. I take issue with the idea that evidence for the best kind of writing is adduced from the popularity of that writing; I think that popular writing can be bad, and (perhaps less commonly) good writing can be unpopular. Nonetheless I think that the end of your sentence expresses the important idea very well: "… without losing their meaning." I think that there is too much of a trend in modern expositions to achieve the appearance of clarity and accessibility by dumbing down subjects enough to give readers only the feeling of understanding—which is not only probably bad on its own, but can also make the same readers resistant to later learning the subtleties, because discussing them sacrifices what they see as the clarity and accessibility of their preferred (incomplete) exposition.

madhadron 8y ago

Conveying meaning as clearly as possible implies direct, simple prose when you assume the reader shares a language game (per Wittgenstein) with you. Thus a theoretical physicist can communicate a fact about field theories to a colleague very directly, but that communication is hardly clear to a layman. What do you do if what you are working on is meaning that doesn't fit the usual language game, and part of the work is seeing what varying the language game can do to meaning? Then there is no direct prose. There is a fabrication of an artifact that leads the reader experientially to this new language game in all its nuance.

matwood 8y ago

> The best way to write to convey meaning is to be as absolutely clear as possible Agreed. Clear and concise writing hard, and takes time. The writer needs to revise, revise, and revise again. There is a great anecdote in "On Writing Well" where the author remembers taking students first drafts and telling them to cut them in half.