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Did anyone else find the writing in this post almost unbearable? It's deliberately showy in a way while also seeming self-conscious about being perceived as pre
by ppod 7y ago
Did anyone else find the writing in this post almost unbearable? It's deliberately showy in a way while also seeming self-conscious about being perceived as pretentious. The predictable dig at modernist architecture is exactly what I expect from this kind of prescriptive aesthetic paternalism.
- chengiz 7y agoHe talks about John McPhee, who has written a lot about diverse topics and also about writing as an art and process. The latter is interesting, if perhaps a tad overwrought and obsessive; the former is all over the place. In that the amount of thought doesnt necessarily translate into good writing. Case in point: "diversion of the field" which to be honest doesnt wow me in any way. This writer suffers from the same problem.
- greggyb 7y agoDo you find it fustian?
- specialist 7y agoppod wrote: "prescriptive aesthetic paternalism" Made my day.
- ppod 7y agoI'm not criticising it for being overwrought, rather that it is self-consciously attempting to be "elegant" in an unnatural way.
- AmVess 7y agoIt is poorly written. Some writers confuse mental diarrhea with good writing. His style is overly wordy and needlessly punctuated. He takes too long to push the informative points, all the while cloaking them in too much empty dross. At first, I thought this was an example of something written by an AI program. It is lumpy and disjointed to the mind in the same way that the Uncanny Valley is disorienting to the eye. I'm going to settle on it simply being a poorly written meandering of thought disguised as something that it isn't.
- littlekosh 7y agoThe information that writing can convey is not limited to an equation where the words used exist on one side and the meaning of the sentence on the other. I hate to explain something someone else wrote, but the messy, tangential writing is mirroring the uncertainty that the author calls out in the dictionary definitions that they love. Their intent is to convey the joy that these words have for them when seen through the lens of Webster’s 1913. Joy is not constrained to declarative statements marching in lock step to the beat of logical coherence. To remove the “over wordiness” and “needless punctuation” is to lose the human aspect of the post. Sometimes conveying information is a secondary or tertiary purpose to a piece of prose. Also, not everyone is Raymond Carver. Some people are Henry James.
- onesmallcoin 7y agoI feel like what he could be trying to describe is called a thesaurus
- majormajor 7y agoIs this an intentionally ironically styled comment? Serious question.
- ncmncm 7y agoNo. It is in a discursive style appropriate to the topic. Not what you find in textbooks, but not everything needs to be like a textbook.