3 ms·
I definitely noticed the convoluted, obfuscated writing style of the NYT and New Yorker. The sentences are longer than they need to be, combining multiple inde
by mancerayder 6y ago
I definitely noticed the convoluted, obfuscated writing style of the NYT and New Yorker. The sentences are longer than they need to be, combining multiple independent pieces of data and stringing them together with commas.
Something like this:
Like the style of Adorno and Habermas, two Critical Theorists popular in the literary criticism field, we like to weave together different trains of thought, since this helps drive a narrative that the reader can relate to, and the New Yorker and the NY Times (since arguably they hire their writers with a recent academic background in a journalistic or literary discipline, often swimming in this style of writing, which dates from a particular elitist conception of writing you might find in Dialectic of Enlightenment or Adorno's works of cultural critique) like to make the reader work for it, since this perhaps contributes to the high literary feel of the paper.
- LanceH 6y agoIt seems in the past 15 years there is a deliberate avoidance of the actual topic until deep into the article. I can only assume this hits some optimization for online use.
- mancerayder 6y agoI think it's an elitism in the writing style. If you can write densely, it signals education.
- doggodaddo78 6y agoWord quotas; gotta fill the columns. Density: I make this mistake often. I end up chaining multiple thoughts rather than splitting them up into discrete sentences that link thoughts together. It maybe easier to write but it's harder to read. I use commas for things that can be mentally skipped and lists, and semicolons for related sentence fragments. It's probably an anti-pattern to use semicolons except as a greater grouping like: do you want apples, pears, and bananas; chicken, fish, and beef; or lettuce, tomatoes, and onions?
- robertoandred 6y agoI think it's pretty elitist to think that only the highly educated can read your sentence.
- doggodaddo78 6y agoCopy foreplay or word quotas?