6 ms·
No, it's not just "storytelling", and your answer is pretentious in the extreme, painting an aesthetic preference as some fundamental appreciation for human lif
by arkades 7y ago
No, it's not just "storytelling", and your answer is pretentious in the extreme, painting an aesthetic preference as some fundamental appreciation for human life, and the opposite by implication as crass.
Storytelling is about narrative. It's about conveying a sequence of ideas in such a way as to make an impression. One can achieve storytelling without an abundance of irrelevant details ("Sometimes a travelling circus unfolds itself on the hard-packed sand of the heath’s carpark" does nothing to further establish our sense of setting, nor to characterize anything at all) and just being over-dramatic (leading with an inset quote about little at all, but making sure to lead with the title 'Counter-Terrorism Command').
Just because it's storytelling doesn't mean it's /good/ storytelling. The whole thing stays just one shade shy of purple. That is annoying as hell for a lot of people, and not at all "a great gift of being alive" that is "a really lovely thing." On the contrary: that's something a lot of even-literary editors would take a hacksaw to.
- b3kart 7y agoCouldn’t agree more. Know someone in the art history field, and all their academic texts are insufferable. People aren’t trying to deliver a point in the simplest way possible, instead they engage in some sort of linguistic masturbation. Obscure words, lengthy sentences, intricate syntactic constructions, etc. I assume this is some sort of a signalling method: “You can barely understand what I am taking about, and you don’t know half of the words, so I must be smart and this text must be important.”
- kick 7y agoall their academic texts are insufferable [...] linguistic masturbation. Obscure words, lengthy sentences, intricate syntactic constructions, etc. You mean, "Every CS/Engineering Textbook Since Carver A. Mead stopped writing them"? I don't think you're wrong: academics are insufferable. But it's unfair to blame this solely on art folk: STEM is just as bad, if not worse. Mathematics is a thousand times guiltier of this than any other field.
- jschwartzi 7y agoWell I liked it.
- namdnay 7y agoIt's funny that you criticise the parent for being pretentious, and then go on to explain to them what storytelling really is
- zaroth 7y agoIt’s funny how you... </s>
- CPLX 7y agoThis comment probably could have been reduced to one paragraph, with fewer parentheticals and italics. Nonetheless I’m glad you posted it. I think it’s a positive thing when people expound at length on subjects that interest them.
- arkades 7y agoBah, humbug.