4 ms·

Is it just me, or whenever I try to read what Noam Chomsky says or listen to him I have to constantly read over it to understand it?

iamnotacrook 7y ago
Perhaps you only infrequently read sentences not aimed at younger people? So much writing is these days. He seems very clear and straightforward to me. Aren't there sites out there which analyse text and determine the "reading age"? Perhaps perform some comparisons for yourself.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
  Given that Chomsky is an extraordinarily accomplished intellectual, I think it's a little denigrating to assume if you can't easily understand his works you read only children's book.
tunesmith 7y ago
I don't know if it's true for Chomsky, but I have noticed that a lot of academic sentences use a lot of inner clauses. I think it's a bad habit. When reading those sentences as a programmer, I wish for a lot of parentheses so I can determine order of operations. Without them we're left to infer that order, which is extra work when we're also just trying to figure out what the sentence itself is about. Here's an example from T.M. Scanlon's "What We Owe to Each Other", a philosophical book on morality I was reading yesterday: "When I ask myself what reason the fact that an action would be wrong provides me with not to do it, my answer is that such an action would be one that I could not justify to others on grounds I could expect them to accept." This sentence is actually key to what the entire book is about, but.... "what reason the fact that an action"? I mean even as programmers we are taught to break apart long boolean expressions. It's kind of like garden path sentences but a more general syntactic ambiguity that smart people are more guilty of due to their need to explain complex subjects. Hard for a writer to recognize, because they know what they mean.
- ahartmetz 7y ago
  I would go further and say that many academics hide their banal or confused ideas behind overcomplex language. They learn to write that way by reading all those awfully written texts and imitating them. But Chomsky is not like that - he usually has something insightful to say expresses it plainly.
  - ahartmetz 7y ago
    ... AND expresses it plainly. Oops.
farss 7y ago
http://mentalfloss.com/article/18991/chomskybot-almost-intelligible-gibberish http://mentalfloss.com/article/18991/chomskybot-almost-intel...

iamnotacrook 7y ago

Perhaps you only infrequently read sentences not aimed at younger people? So much writing is these days. He seems very clear and straightforward to me. Aren't there sites out there which analyse text and determine the "reading age"? Perhaps perform some comparisons for yourself.

SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
Given that Chomsky is an extraordinarily accomplished intellectual, I think it's a little denigrating to assume if you can't easily understand his works you read only children's book.

tunesmith 7y ago

I don't know if it's true for Chomsky, but I have noticed that a lot of academic sentences use a lot of inner clauses. I think it's a bad habit. When reading those sentences as a programmer, I wish for a lot of parentheses so I can determine order of operations. Without them we're left to infer that order, which is extra work when we're also just trying to figure out what the sentence itself is about. Here's an example from T.M. Scanlon's "What We Owe to Each Other", a philosophical book on morality I was reading yesterday: "When I ask myself what reason the fact that an action would be wrong provides me with not to do it, my answer is that such an action would be one that I could not justify to others on grounds I could expect them to accept." This sentence is actually key to what the entire book is about, but.... "what reason the fact that an action"? I mean even as programmers we are taught to break apart long boolean expressions. It's kind of like garden path sentences but a more general syntactic ambiguity that smart people are more guilty of due to their need to explain complex subjects. Hard for a writer to recognize, because they know what they mean.

ahartmetz 7y ago
I would go further and say that many academics hide their banal or confused ideas behind overcomplex language. They learn to write that way by reading all those awfully written texts and imitating them. But Chomsky is not like that - he usually has something insightful to say expresses it plainly.
- ahartmetz 7y ago
  ... AND expresses it plainly. Oops.

farss 7y ago

http://mentalfloss.com/article/18991/chomskybot-almost-intelligible-gibberish http://mentalfloss.com/article/18991/chomskybot-almost-intel...