8 ms·

I couldn't disagree more with this piece, especially the idea of a "draft #4" where you go through what you've written and replace all "pedestrian" words with l

I couldn't disagree more with this piece, especially the idea of a "draft #4" where you go through what you've written and replace all "pedestrian" words with less common ones from the dictionary. I know these writers, and how they "write" - it's painful to read and oozes pretentiousness. You can always tell when someone tries to fake having a wider vocabulary.

DarylZero 5y ago
> You can always tell when someone tries to fake having a wider vocabulary. Doubt it. I know I've been accused of using a thesaurus when I was just compulsively and thoughtlessly posting stream of consciousness on social media. I think people who think such things just have small vocabularies. They can't imagine others have any fluency with words they don't know.
dreamcompiler 5y ago
Go read any book by John McPhee (the writer in question) and if you are not delighted I will donate $20 to the charity of your choice. I recommend Oranges but they're all quite good.
elric 5y ago
> I couldn't disagree more with this piece, especially the idea of a "draft #4" where you go through what you've written and replace all plain words with difficult ones. I know these writers, and how they "write" - it's painful to read, they want to make themselves seem better than they are. You can always tell when someone tries to pretend to know more words than they really do.
- Veen 5y ago
  I have a word you may want to add to your vocabulary. chippy ADJECTIVE informal 1. resentful or oversensitive about being perceived as inferior
adzm 5y ago
The whole point here is not to mindlessly replace words but to be able to find words that more accurately describe what you are trying to convey. The expanded definitions and examples are great starting points for digging deeper into both the language and the underlying motivation.
- suction 5y ago
  I understand it wasn't meant to be "mindlessly", I don't appreciate you putting words in my mouth. Still, if you don't have the more accurate word in your vocabulary, then don't use it. It will sound stilted and unnatural in the context of your sentence.
  - asxd 5y ago
    I get what you're saying, and agree. When I was in middle school I'd shamelessly use MS Word to replace words in my reports with fancy sounding synonyms that I had never heard of before. I kind of cringe at the memory. But on the other hand, that's also kind of how I got them to be in my vocabulary. I feel like once you commit to a new word in your own writing, you start seeing it everywhere and getting a feel for how it's naturally being used.
    - boffinAudio 5y ago
      Exactly. This curmudgeonly proposal that ones vocabulary remain immutable is for the dags and curs whose life has not been rewarded by the virtues of newly discovered language.
      - robocat 5y ago
        Making up words is fun for the writer, but it often not fun for the reader. Like the popular perception of poetry. Few people have a deep knowledge of their own language or other languages, so their inventions come across as childish. Your own usage of “dags” is frustrating because as a reader from Australasia, “dag” has a common meaning. Example usages: “You’re a dag”, “Fred Dagg”, “rattle your dags”, “clean up those daggy sheep”. And back on topic, the common meaning in Australasia is not mentioned in the online American Merriam-Webster dictionary!
jacobolus 5y ago
Before folks vote up this facile, misguided criticism, at least read the referenced essay https://jsomers.net/mcphee-draft-no-4.pdf https://jsomers.net/mcphee-draft-no-4.pdf The whole point of published writing is to put enough effort into one-to-many communication to be clear, concise, and expressive. Finding the right words (not the fanciest or rarest words) helps writing to better transmit intention from author to reader. Careful revision and editing should be celebrated as expressing appreciation for readers, not sneered at as inauthentic.
- suction 5y ago
  Lmao
- avgcorrection 5y ago
  > Before folks vote up this facile Word not found. Did you mean: shallow?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - boffinAudio 5y ago
    facile | ˈfasʌɪl, ˈfasɪl | adjective 1 ignoring the true complexities of an issue; superficial: facile generalizations. • (of a person) having a superficial or simplistic knowledge or approach: a man of facile and shallow intellect. 2 (especially of success in sport) easily achieved; effortless: a facile seven-lengths victory. I guess someone needs a better dictionary (this was sourced from Dictionary.app on MacOS, btw...)
    - lelanthran 5y ago
      > facile | ˈfasʌɪl, ˈfasɪl | adjective 1 ignoring the true complexities of an issue; superficial: facile generalizations. • (of a person) having a superficial or simplistic knowledge or approach: a man of facile and shallow intellect. 2 (especially of success in sport) easily achieved; effortless: a facile seven-lengths victory. > > I guess someone needs a better dictionary (this was sourced from Dictionary.app on MacOS, btw...) I think you are reinforcing the authors point. That definition most certainly does not present a mental image of prose in which the best word is 'facile'. Instead it makes me think that 'facile' is almost indistinguishable from 'ignorant'. Compare that definition to the one from Websters 1913-1928 definition: Fac"ile (?) a. [L. facilis, prop., capable of being done or made, hence, facile, easy, fr. facere to make, do: cf. F. facile. Srr Fact, and cf. Faculty.] 1. Easy to be done or performed: not difficult; performable or attainable with little labor. *Order . . . will render the work facile and delightful.* Evelyn. 2. Easy to be surmounted or removed; easily conquerable; readily mastered. *The facile gates of hell too slightly barred.* Milton. 3. Easy of access or converse; mild; courteous; not haughty, austere, or distant; affable; complaisant. *I meant she should be courteous, facile, sweet.* B. Jonson. 4. Easily persuaded to good or bad; yielding; ductile to a fault; pliant; flexible. *Since Adam, and his facile consort Eve, Lost Paradise, deceived by me.* Milton. *This is treating Burns like a child, a person of so facile a disposition as not to be trusted without a keeper on the king's highway.* Prof. Wilson. 5. Ready; quick; expert; as, he is facile in expedients; he wields a facile pen. Which definition more accurately represents the word as it is used in prose? 'Facile' and 'delightful' go together quite well. 'Ignorant' and 'delightful' do not.
function_seven 5y ago
It's not about using less common words. It's about finding variants that better capture the essence what you're trying to say, or add life to the prose. > He explains that for him, draft #4 is the draft after the painstaking labor of creation is done, when all that’s left is to punch up the language, to replace shopworn words and phrases with stuff that sings. None of that suggests the writer is looking to use obscure words. I know the writers you're talking about as well; they're just doing it badly, or mimicking what they think a good writer does. Compare: Todd opened the curtains and the room got brighter with: Todd parted the curtains and sunlight streamed into the room Both describe the same thing, and both use ordinary words. But the second one paints a better image in your mind. Of the curtains revealing the window behind them, of the way the room gained illumination, etc. It's livelier. Or, let's say your marketing team proposes a new slogan: "Our intention is to make sure you're satisfied". A good writer takes a crack at it and comes up with "We aim to please". First one sounds corporate and boring, the second one is friendly and informal. But both use words that everyday people would understand. If you've just finished a draft of a few thousand words, a lot of dull phrasing will have made it into the writing. While writing those drafts you were focused on the narrative or plot or whatever. Draft #4 is when you comb through it and look for crusty phrases, replacing them with "stuff that sings". It needn't be garrulous ;)
- Retric 5y ago
  The issue is authors who spend to much time with a thesaurus rarely actually understand the words their choosing. It’s the difference between an artist painting using charcoal and a child using markers. The second is more colorful, yet crude. Further writing is about the goal, describing a hallucination using stilted language for example can actually make things more vivid. Todd opened the curtains and the room got brighter. Was the room illuminated by the sun, moon, streetlights, or did the walls suddenly glow? We don’t know as things have been abstracted to show effects rather than a clear causal chain. The important bit is to be making stylistic choices not simply imitating competence and hoping nobody noticed the difference.
  - function_seven 5y ago
    Yeah those authors exist. I don’t think McPhee or the OP are among them. A thesaurus is a tool like any other. A good writer knows how to wield it, poor ones will just cut themselves. The “Draft #4” methodology doesn’t in itself suggest that the writer is good or bad.
Timwi 5y ago
I am so glad to have read your comment. You took the words right out of my mouth. I was very confused by the phrase “diversion of the field” as both “diversion” and “field” can have so many diverse and incompatible meanings. The author asks: “Who decided that the American public couldn’t handle ‘a soft and fitful luster’?”. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say the correct answer to that question is “research”. Linguists and child psychologists have studied the effect of dictionary definitions on learning and realized that simpler definitions are more useful to school students than the author's dream of “stuff that sings”, and that a clear and succinct definition like “a quality that evokes pity or sadness” is more comprehensible, and hence more useful, than whatever Webster's blurb is trying to express. It should be ironic that the author would use “fustian” as his prime example — a word which, prior to reading this article, I had never encountered before, but after seeing the paraphrasing, “It’s using fancy language where fancy language isn’t called for”, I now know exactly how to describe this piece.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- taylorius 5y ago
  Perhaps modern dictionaries' definitions are more accessible to someone with a child's grasp of English, as you say. However JSomers makes an excellent point, that Webster's definitions are more accurate, as well as being examples of great writing. One solution - Basic and Advanced dictionaries?
  - boffinAudio 5y ago
    One is not a child forever, especially if words old and new carry the years.
    - alisonkisk 5y ago
- lelanthran 5y ago
  The goal of the modern dictionary is quite different to the goal of Websters original dictionary. The modern (english) dictionary aims to serve as a list of definitions and meanings of words for someone who requires a list of definitions of words. This means that the explanations and example usages have to be short and simple because the person using it may not have a full command of the language. The original Websters dictionary, as far as I can tell, serves to document the language for existing native-language users. This lets it be more expressive in the words definition (because you can use more expressive language), with the expectation that the user of the dictionary already has some sort of mastery with the language.
kragen 5y ago
> I know these writers, and how they "write" - it's painful to read and oozes pretentiousness. Are you thinking, perhaps, of Mark Twain? I've never heard anyone say he was "painful to read" or "oozes pretentiousness"; you could be the first. Yet it was Twain who wrote, "the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning," which is what this "draft #4" business is all about. (He stole the phrasing from a friend of his, but the sentiment was his own, in a letter in 01888 to George Bainton: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2019/09/02/lightning/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2019/09/02/lightning/)
- cookie_monsta 5y ago
  Yes, but no doubt you're aware of Twain's companion piece to that quote: “Don't use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do.”
  - kragen 5y ago
    Absolutely, and that is often the point of rummaging through the dictionary. On another occasion Twain put it more... eloquently? Here he does ooze pretentiousness: > In promulgating your esoteric cogitations, or articulating your superficial sentimentalities and amicable, philosophical or psychological observations, beware of platitudinous ponderosity. Let your conversational communications possess a clarified conciseness, a compact comprehensibleness, coalescent consistency, and a concatenated cogency... Sedulously avoid all polysyllabic profundity, pompous prolixity, psittaceous vacuity, ventriloquial verbosity and vaniloquent vapidity. McPhee's essay Somers was commenting on warns against the same danger: > In the search for words, thesauruses are useful things, but they don't talk about the words they list. They are also dangerous. They can lead you to choose a polysyllabic and fuzzy word when a simple and clear one is better. The value of a thesaurus is not to make a writer seem to have a vast vocabulary of recondite words. So clearly McPhee was not advocating the unnecessary use of hundred-dollar words [correcting for inflation since Twain's time].
    - cookie_monsta 5y ago
gorgoiler 5y ago
Poor writers use a dictionary in the way you describe. Using a dictionary does not make you a poor writer. I was satisfied with the example in the article that this wasn’t just a hack to purvey overly mellifluous verbiage.
boffinAudio 5y ago
> You can always tell when someone tries to fake having a wider vocabulary Is it really 'fake' if they're actually using the words appropriately in whatever prose they are creating? At what point do you address your own hubris when you encounter a word you don't use, or even understand, and rapidly make the conclusion that the writer is pretentious? Surely the assessment of anothers pretentiousness happens after examining ones own hubris on the subject matter, or perhaps to put it another way - lack of the sophistication observed in others ... ?
Veen 5y ago
The goal is not to replace common words with less common ones, but imprecise words with more precise ones, especially those with connotations and implications that more closely fit the surrounding writing. There's a place for plain, utilitarian writing, but your complaint is a bit like saying Vermeer is a pretentious wanker because he paid more attention to colour and symbolism than the illustrator who did the images for my microwave's instruction manual.
froh 5y ago
That's the key difference between technical writing and literature: Technical writing needs to be simple, to the point, short sentences, same word for the same concept, always. Literature has a priviledge of poetic entertainment. It may indulge on linguistic expression and the readers will vote with their feet what they love and what they hate.
icambron 5y ago
John McPhee isn't a pretentious writer at all, though, and I encourage you to try him out to test your theory. Getting rid of pedestrian words doesn't require you to replace them with ostentatious words, merely more vibrant, descriptive ones.
tomxor 5y ago
Although I agree with the siblings, in that (done well) it should better convey the intended meaning, while also capturing the readers imagination with a little artistry - I know what you are getting at. Sometimes I come across those articles, trying way too hard to add flourish to their writing, but they only achieve a veneer. It does not improve their communication and as you say, it's entirely pretentious. But these are not the same types of writing, one is genuine, the other mimicry.

DarylZero 5y ago

> You can always tell when someone tries to fake having a wider vocabulary. Doubt it. I know I've been accused of using a thesaurus when I was just compulsively and thoughtlessly posting stream of consciousness on social media. I think people who think such things just have small vocabularies. They can't imagine others have any fluency with words they don't know.

dreamcompiler 5y ago

Go read any book by John McPhee (the writer in question) and if you are not delighted I will donate $20 to the charity of your choice. I recommend Oranges but they're all quite good.

elric 5y ago

> I couldn't disagree more with this piece, especially the idea of a "draft #4" where you go through what you've written and replace all plain words with difficult ones. I know these writers, and how they "write" - it's painful to read, they want to make themselves seem better than they are. You can always tell when someone tries to pretend to know more words than they really do.

Veen 5y ago
I have a word you may want to add to your vocabulary. chippy ADJECTIVE informal 1. resentful or oversensitive about being perceived as inferior

adzm 5y ago

The whole point here is not to mindlessly replace words but to be able to find words that more accurately describe what you are trying to convey. The expanded definitions and examples are great starting points for digging deeper into both the language and the underlying motivation.

suction 5y ago
I understand it wasn't meant to be "mindlessly", I don't appreciate you putting words in my mouth. Still, if you don't have the more accurate word in your vocabulary, then don't use it. It will sound stilted and unnatural in the context of your sentence.
- asxd 5y ago
  I get what you're saying, and agree. When I was in middle school I'd shamelessly use MS Word to replace words in my reports with fancy sounding synonyms that I had never heard of before. I kind of cringe at the memory. But on the other hand, that's also kind of how I got them to be in my vocabulary. I feel like once you commit to a new word in your own writing, you start seeing it everywhere and getting a feel for how it's naturally being used.
  - boffinAudio 5y ago
    Exactly. This curmudgeonly proposal that ones vocabulary remain immutable is for the dags and curs whose life has not been rewarded by the virtues of newly discovered language.
    - robocat 5y ago
      Making up words is fun for the writer, but it often not fun for the reader. Like the popular perception of poetry. Few people have a deep knowledge of their own language or other languages, so their inventions come across as childish. Your own usage of “dags” is frustrating because as a reader from Australasia, “dag” has a common meaning. Example usages: “You’re a dag”, “Fred Dagg”, “rattle your dags”, “clean up those daggy sheep”. And back on topic, the common meaning in Australasia is not mentioned in the online American Merriam-Webster dictionary!

jacobolus 5y ago

Before folks vote up this facile, misguided criticism, at least read the referenced essay https://jsomers.net/mcphee-draft-no-4.pdf https://jsomers.net/mcphee-draft-no-4.pdf The whole point of published writing is to put enough effort into one-to-many communication to be clear, concise, and expressive. Finding the right words (not the fanciest or rarest words) helps writing to better transmit intention from author to reader. Careful revision and editing should be celebrated as expressing appreciation for readers, not sneered at as inauthentic.

suction 5y ago
Lmao
avgcorrection 5y ago
> Before folks vote up this facile Word not found. Did you mean: shallow?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- boffinAudio 5y ago
  facile | ˈfasʌɪl, ˈfasɪl | adjective 1 ignoring the true complexities of an issue; superficial: facile generalizations. • (of a person) having a superficial or simplistic knowledge or approach: a man of facile and shallow intellect. 2 (especially of success in sport) easily achieved; effortless: a facile seven-lengths victory. I guess someone needs a better dictionary (this was sourced from Dictionary.app on MacOS, btw...)
  - lelanthran 5y ago
    > facile | ˈfasʌɪl, ˈfasɪl | adjective 1 ignoring the true complexities of an issue; superficial: facile generalizations. • (of a person) having a superficial or simplistic knowledge or approach: a man of facile and shallow intellect. 2 (especially of success in sport) easily achieved; effortless: a facile seven-lengths victory. > > I guess someone needs a better dictionary (this was sourced from Dictionary.app on MacOS, btw...) I think you are reinforcing the authors point. That definition most certainly does not present a mental image of prose in which the best word is 'facile'. Instead it makes me think that 'facile' is almost indistinguishable from 'ignorant'. Compare that definition to the one from Websters 1913-1928 definition: Fac"ile (?) a. [L. facilis, prop., capable of being done or made, hence, facile, easy, fr. facere to make, do: cf. F. facile. Srr Fact, and cf. Faculty.] 1. Easy to be done or performed: not difficult; performable or attainable with little labor. *Order . . . will render the work facile and delightful.* Evelyn. 2. Easy to be surmounted or removed; easily conquerable; readily mastered. *The facile gates of hell too slightly barred.* Milton. 3. Easy of access or converse; mild; courteous; not haughty, austere, or distant; affable; complaisant. *I meant she should be courteous, facile, sweet.* B. Jonson. 4. Easily persuaded to good or bad; yielding; ductile to a fault; pliant; flexible. *Since Adam, and his facile consort Eve, Lost Paradise, deceived by me.* Milton. *This is treating Burns like a child, a person of so facile a disposition as not to be trusted without a keeper on the king's highway.* Prof. Wilson. 5. Ready; quick; expert; as, he is facile in expedients; he wields a facile pen. Which definition more accurately represents the word as it is used in prose? 'Facile' and 'delightful' go together quite well. 'Ignorant' and 'delightful' do not.

function_seven 5y ago

It's not about using less common words. It's about finding variants that better capture the essence what you're trying to say, or add life to the prose. > He explains that for him, draft #4 is the draft after the painstaking labor of creation is done, when all that’s left is to punch up the language, to replace shopworn words and phrases with stuff that sings. None of that suggests the writer is looking to use obscure words. I know the writers you're talking about as well; they're just doing it badly, or mimicking what they think a good writer does. Compare: Todd opened the curtains and the room got brighter with: Todd parted the curtains and sunlight streamed into the room Both describe the same thing, and both use ordinary words. But the second one paints a better image in your mind. Of the curtains revealing the window behind them, of the way the room gained illumination, etc. It's livelier. Or, let's say your marketing team proposes a new slogan: "Our intention is to make sure you're satisfied". A good writer takes a crack at it and comes up with "We aim to please". First one sounds corporate and boring, the second one is friendly and informal. But both use words that everyday people would understand. If you've just finished a draft of a few thousand words, a lot of dull phrasing will have made it into the writing. While writing those drafts you were focused on the narrative or plot or whatever. Draft #4 is when you comb through it and look for crusty phrases, replacing them with "stuff that sings". It needn't be garrulous ;)

Retric 5y ago
The issue is authors who spend to much time with a thesaurus rarely actually understand the words their choosing. It’s the difference between an artist painting using charcoal and a child using markers. The second is more colorful, yet crude. Further writing is about the goal, describing a hallucination using stilted language for example can actually make things more vivid. Todd opened the curtains and the room got brighter. Was the room illuminated by the sun, moon, streetlights, or did the walls suddenly glow? We don’t know as things have been abstracted to show effects rather than a clear causal chain. The important bit is to be making stylistic choices not simply imitating competence and hoping nobody noticed the difference.
- function_seven 5y ago
  Yeah those authors exist. I don’t think McPhee or the OP are among them. A thesaurus is a tool like any other. A good writer knows how to wield it, poor ones will just cut themselves. The “Draft #4” methodology doesn’t in itself suggest that the writer is good or bad.

Timwi 5y ago

I am so glad to have read your comment. You took the words right out of my mouth. I was very confused by the phrase “diversion of the field” as both “diversion” and “field” can have so many diverse and incompatible meanings. The author asks: “Who decided that the American public couldn’t handle ‘a soft and fitful luster’?”. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say the correct answer to that question is “research”. Linguists and child psychologists have studied the effect of dictionary definitions on learning and realized that simpler definitions are more useful to school students than the author's dream of “stuff that sings”, and that a clear and succinct definition like “a quality that evokes pity or sadness” is more comprehensible, and hence more useful, than whatever Webster's blurb is trying to express. It should be ironic that the author would use “fustian” as his prime example — a word which, prior to reading this article, I had never encountered before, but after seeing the paraphrasing, “It’s using fancy language where fancy language isn’t called for”, I now know exactly how to describe this piece.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
taylorius 5y ago
Perhaps modern dictionaries' definitions are more accessible to someone with a child's grasp of English, as you say. However JSomers makes an excellent point, that Webster's definitions are more accurate, as well as being examples of great writing. One solution - Basic and Advanced dictionaries?
- boffinAudio 5y ago
  One is not a child forever, especially if words old and new carry the years.
  - alisonkisk 5y ago
lelanthran 5y ago
The goal of the modern dictionary is quite different to the goal of Websters original dictionary. The modern (english) dictionary aims to serve as a list of definitions and meanings of words for someone who requires a list of definitions of words. This means that the explanations and example usages have to be short and simple because the person using it may not have a full command of the language. The original Websters dictionary, as far as I can tell, serves to document the language for existing native-language users. This lets it be more expressive in the words definition (because you can use more expressive language), with the expectation that the user of the dictionary already has some sort of mastery with the language.

kragen 5y ago

> I know these writers, and how they "write" - it's painful to read and oozes pretentiousness. Are you thinking, perhaps, of Mark Twain? I've never heard anyone say he was "painful to read" or "oozes pretentiousness"; you could be the first. Yet it was Twain who wrote, "the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning," which is what this "draft #4" business is all about. (He stole the phrasing from a friend of his, but the sentiment was his own, in a letter in 01888 to George Bainton: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2019/09/02/lightning/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2019/09/02/lightning/)

cookie_monsta 5y ago
Yes, but no doubt you're aware of Twain's companion piece to that quote: “Don't use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do.”
- kragen 5y ago
  Absolutely, and that is often the point of rummaging through the dictionary. On another occasion Twain put it more... eloquently? Here he does ooze pretentiousness: > In promulgating your esoteric cogitations, or articulating your superficial sentimentalities and amicable, philosophical or psychological observations, beware of platitudinous ponderosity. Let your conversational communications possess a clarified conciseness, a compact comprehensibleness, coalescent consistency, and a concatenated cogency... Sedulously avoid all polysyllabic profundity, pompous prolixity, psittaceous vacuity, ventriloquial verbosity and vaniloquent vapidity. McPhee's essay Somers was commenting on warns against the same danger: > In the search for words, thesauruses are useful things, but they don't talk about the words they list. They are also dangerous. They can lead you to choose a polysyllabic and fuzzy word when a simple and clear one is better. The value of a thesaurus is not to make a writer seem to have a vast vocabulary of recondite words. So clearly McPhee was not advocating the unnecessary use of hundred-dollar words [correcting for inflation since Twain's time].
  - cookie_monsta 5y ago

gorgoiler 5y ago

Poor writers use a dictionary in the way you describe. Using a dictionary does not make you a poor writer. I was satisfied with the example in the article that this wasn’t just a hack to purvey overly mellifluous verbiage.

boffinAudio 5y ago

> You can always tell when someone tries to fake having a wider vocabulary Is it really 'fake' if they're actually using the words appropriately in whatever prose they are creating? At what point do you address your own hubris when you encounter a word you don't use, or even understand, and rapidly make the conclusion that the writer is pretentious? Surely the assessment of anothers pretentiousness happens after examining ones own hubris on the subject matter, or perhaps to put it another way - lack of the sophistication observed in others ... ?

Veen 5y ago

The goal is not to replace common words with less common ones, but imprecise words with more precise ones, especially those with connotations and implications that more closely fit the surrounding writing. There's a place for plain, utilitarian writing, but your complaint is a bit like saying Vermeer is a pretentious wanker because he paid more attention to colour and symbolism than the illustrator who did the images for my microwave's instruction manual.

froh 5y ago

That's the key difference between technical writing and literature: Technical writing needs to be simple, to the point, short sentences, same word for the same concept, always. Literature has a priviledge of poetic entertainment. It may indulge on linguistic expression and the readers will vote with their feet what they love and what they hate.

icambron 5y ago

John McPhee isn't a pretentious writer at all, though, and I encourage you to try him out to test your theory. Getting rid of pedestrian words doesn't require you to replace them with ostentatious words, merely more vibrant, descriptive ones.

tomxor 5y ago

Although I agree with the siblings, in that (done well) it should better convey the intended meaning, while also capturing the readers imagination with a little artistry - I know what you are getting at. Sometimes I come across those articles, trying way too hard to add flourish to their writing, but they only achieve a veneer. It does not improve their communication and as you say, it's entirely pretentious. But these are not the same types of writing, one is genuine, the other mimicry.