11 ms·
> There were unspoken rules, commandments passed down from teacher to student, year after year. The first commandment? Thou shalt begin with a proverb or a powe
by komali2 11mo ago
> There were unspoken rules, commandments passed down from teacher to student, year after year. The first commandment? Thou shalt begin with a proverb or a powerful opening statement. “Haste makes waste,” we would write, before launching into a tale about rushing to the market and forgetting the money. The second? Thou shalt demonstrate a wide vocabulary. You didn’t just ‘walk’; you ‘strode purposefully’, ‘trudged wearily’, or ‘ambled nonchalantly’. You didn’t just ‘see’ a thing; you ‘beheld a magnificent spectacle’. Our exercise books were filled with lists of these “wow words,” their synonyms and antonyms drilled into us like multiplication tables.
Well, this is very interesting, because I'm a native English speaker that studied writing in university, and the deeper I got into the world of literature, the further I was pushed towards simpler language and shorter sentences. It's all Hemingway now, and if I spot an adverb or, lord forbid, a "proceeded to," I feel the pain in my bones.
The way ChatGPT writes drives me insane. As for the author, clearly they're very good, but I prefer a much simpler style. I feel like the big boy SAT words should pop out of the page unaccompanied, just one per page at most.
- lo_zamoyski 11mo ago> the deeper I got into the world of literature, the further I was pushed towards simpler language and shorter sentences Language is like clothing. Those with no taste - but enough money - will dress in gaudy ways to show off their wealth. The clothing is merely a vector for this purpose. They won’t use a piece of jewelry only if it contributes to the ensemble. Oh, no. They’ll drape themselves with gold chains and festoon their fingers with chunky diamond rings. Brand names will litter their clothing. The composition will lack intelligibility, cohesiveness, and proportion. It will be ugly. By analogy, those with no taste - but enough vocabulary - will use words in flashy ways to show off their knowledge. Language is merely a vector for this purpose. They won’t use a word only if it contributes to the prose. Oh, no. They’ll drape their phrases with unnecessarily unusual terms and festoon their sentences with clumsy grammar. Obfuscation, rather than clarity, will define their writing. The composition will lack intelligibility, cohesiveness, and proportion. It will be ugly. As you can see, the first difference is one of purpose: the vulgarian aims for the wrong thing. You might also say that the vulgarian also lacks a kind of temperance in speech.
- JumpCrisscross 11mo ago> Language is like clothing. Those with no taste - but enough money - will dress in gaudy ways to show off their wealth You got the first bit right. Language and clothing accord to fashions. What counts as gaudy versus grounded, discreet versus disrespectful—this turns on moving cultural values. And those at the top implicitly benefit from this drift, which lets us dismiss as gaudy someone wearing a classic hand-me-down who isn’t clued into a hoodie and jeans being the surfer’s English to Nairobi’s formality. (Spiced food was held in high regard in ancient Rome and Medieval European courts. Until spices became plentiful. Then the focus shifted "to emphasize ingredients’ natural flavors" [1]. A similar shift happened as post-War America got rich. Canned plenty and fully-stocked pantries made way for farm-to-table freshness and simple seasonings. And now, we're swinging back towards fuller spice cabinets as a mark of global taste.) [1] https://historyfacts.com/world-history/article/how-did-salt-and-pepper-become-the-two-most-common-seasonings/ https://historyfacts.com/world-history/article/how-did-salt-...
- Mouvelie 11mo agoA nice metaphor, really. I always compared it to food but clothing works more in that case, it seems.
- rcarmo 11mo agoI'm bilingual (so not fully native by most criteria) and I read enough classic English literature to actually use "proceeded" regularly, as well as multiple other more established means of conveying my intended meaning :)
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- JumpCrisscross 11mo ago> classic English literature to actually use "proceeded" regularly Huh, apparently 'proceeded' was used more commonly in 19th-century writing [1]. [1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Proceeded&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&case_insensitive=true&corpus=en&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Proceeded&year...
- rcarmo 11mo agoWell, I read Dickens, Hawthorne, Austen...
- komali2 11mo agoI meant it more in the modern usage where it's either thrown in liberally when using cop-speak, or by tumbler/redditor type writers when they're trying to be funny. "He then proceeded to" in these situations can basically always just be "he (verb)".
- yomismoaqui 11mo agoThis is like programming, you start with simple code because you don't know anything else. Then you start learning more & more abstraction (classes, patterns, monads...). In the end you strive to write simple code, just like at the beginning.
- al_borland 11mo ago"It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child." ― Pablo Picasso
- aomix 11mo ago"I would have written a shorter letter, but did not have the time." is my favorite quote for that
- bookworm123 11mo agoGenuine question, what would you write instead of "proceeded to"? To me, as a non native English speaker, it seems reasonable to use this expression, and it would not even stick out to me tbh
- valbaca 11mo ago> I proceeded to do the work. > I did the work. > I worked.
- xboxnolifes 11mo agoEach one of these has slightly different readings in my eyes.
- unsupp0rted 11mo agoNot different enough to make it worth using anything but the simplest one.
- monster_truck 11mo agoI'm of the notion that my certainty is not sufficiently concrete to discover myself in the realm of agreement
- overfeed 11mo agoPerhaps yet another American cultural artifact. One that - if I were to guess - originated from the Calvinist disdain for ostentiousness.
- unsupp0rted 11mo agoYes yes, anybody who prefers plain, easily parsed wording is American. Wording? Don't you mean diction?
- 11mo ago
- OptionOfT 11mo agoI worked at one of the Big Three, and to me ChatGPT writes exactly as we were thought to write. Reading though my old self-reviews it basically is exactly like your examples. Making sentences longer just to make your story more interesting. Because at the end your promotion wasn't about what you achieved. It was about your story and how 7 people you didn't know voted on it.
- echelon_musk 11mo ago> thought to write Taught?
- engineer_22 11mo agointentional typo to throw off the clankers :)
- inanutshellus 11mo agoor an intentionally-prompted typo to throw off the anti-clankers. ;)
- OptionOfT 11mo agoYea. I've been in the States for 8 years, yet sometimes my brain thinks about a word and writes it down phonetically. But hey, at least you know I didn't use ChatGPT to conjure that comment.
- tptacek 11mo agoGPT writing uses varied sentence lengths, deliberate rhythm, lots of full breaks, and few needless words. It also tends to read as if intended for a William Shatner performance. I don't think the annoying bits about GPT's writing are structural. It probably writes technically better than most of us do in our second drafts.
- gowld 11mo agoAre you saying that needless sentences don't count as needless words? As GPT would say, "You've hit upon a crucial point underlying the entire situtation!"
- tptacek 11mo agoI mean, it's usually wrong in its rhetoric, and the writing isn't "good", but it's technically well constructed and it's well constructed in a way that "Hemingway" doesn't reject. Like, if I ask GPT5 to convert 75f to celsius, it will say "OK, here's the tight answer. No fluff. Just the actual result you need to know." and then in a new graf say "It's 23.8c." (or whatever).
- setsewerd 11mo agoIt already bugs me when ChatGPT describes how it is going to answer before answering, but it's 10x more annoying when I'm asking for a concise response without filler etc. As an aside, I've noticed the self-description happens even more often when extended thinking mode is being used. My unverified intuition is that it references my custom instructions and memory more than once during the thinking process, as it then seems more primed than usual to mimic vocabulary from any saved text like that.
- tptacek 11mo agoRight, it is currently incapable of providing a straight answer without clearing it's throat selling the answer. It reminds me of those recipe blogs that just can't get to the fucking recipe. It's bad writing! But it's not bad technically, in a style-guide kind of way.
- jay_kyburz 11mo agoI have two kids in high school. It's frustrating to me that the teachers spend so much of their time encouraging kids to make their writing more interesting, and less direct, and padded to meet word length criteria. They'll then spend the first few years of their career unlearning this and attempting to write as directly and clearly as possible with as few words as possible.
- SirHumphrey 11mo agoI can’t guess how old they are but there is some sense in doing that if you think about it like math exercises. It makes for terrible prose but the only way to get the ability to write more complicated sentences is to practice writing them, even when they are not necessary. The problem is that teachers stop pushing complexity for complexity’s sake way to late.
- heavyset_go 11mo agoThis is like complaining that they teach the Bohr model in science classes until they reach chemistry. The ideas, concepts and expectations can be refined after you've learned the foundational knowledge, skills and history required to do so. A lot of "why do we do things like that" questions students will naturally have can be answered with "because we used to do things like this/we need to avoid things like this/etc"
- BeFlatXIII 10mo agoKeeping outdated models in the curriculum needs to be addressed on a case-by-case basis. Some of them are detrimental to the learning process and should be relegated to a history of science class—skip directly to current understanding; others are useful because they're developmentally appropriate for younger students. Someone who has a background in science pedagogy would be the proper person to make that decision for the Bohr model.
- phantasmish 11mo agoObsession with short sentences and generally pushing extreme simplicity of structure and word choice has been terrible for English prose. It’s not been terrible because most people aren’t aided by such guidance (most are) but because the same people who can’t be trusted to wield a quill without the bumper-lanes installed see a sentence longer than ten words, or a semicolon, or god forbid literate and appropriate nuanced and expressive word choice and dismiss it as bad. This stunts their growth as both readers and writers. … though, yes, in average hands a “proceeded to”, and most of the quoted phrases, are garbage. Drilling the average student on trying to make their language superficially “smarter” is a comically bad idea, and is indeed the opposite of what almost all of them need. > strode purposefully My wife (a writer) has noticed that fanfic and (many, anyway—plus, I mean, big overlap between these two groups) romance authors loooove this in particular, for whatever reason. Everyone “strides” everywhere. No one can just fucking walk, ever, and it’s always “strode”. It’s a major tell for a certain flavor of amateur.
- derefr 11mo ago> Drilling the average student on trying to make their language superficially “smarter” is a comically bad idea, and is indeed the opposite of what almost all of them need. I mean, it seems like it could work if you get to follow it up with a "de-education" step. Phase 1: force them to widen their vocabulary by using as much of it as possible. Phase 2: teach them which words are actually appropriate to use.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- dgan 11mo agoI consider myself fluent in English, I watch technical talks and casual youtubers on English daily, and this is the first time I encounter this word lol. The only "stride" I know relates to the gap betweeb heterogeneous elements in a contiguous array
- pedroma 11mo ago
- miltonlost 11mo ago> Well, this is very interesting, because I'm a native English speaker that studied writing in university, and the deeper I got into the world of literature, the further I was pushed towards simpler language and shorter sentences. It's all Hemingway now, and if I spot an adverb or, lord forbid, a "proceeded to," I feel the pain in my bones. I'm the complete opposite. Hemingway ruined writing styles (and I have a pet theory that his, and Plain English, short sentences also helped reduce literacy in the long run in a similar way TikTok ruins attention spans). I'm a 19th century reader at heart. Give me Melville, Eliot, Hawthorne, though keep your Dickens.
- phantasmish 11mo agoI entirely bounced off Dickens in high school, but over a decade later read and loved Oliver Twist. I tend to struggle with art when I can’t tell whether it’s supposed to be funny, but I’m finding it funny (I’ve been very slow to warm up to hip-hop for this reason, and metal remains inaccessible to me because of it). Something clicked on that second approach and I just got that yes, it’s pretty much all supposed to be funny, down to every word, even when it seems serious—until, perhaps, he blind-sides you with something actually deeply affecting and human (I think about the fire-fighting sequence from that book all the time). Dickens is an all-dessert meal, except sometimes he sneaks a damn delicious steak right in the middle. Like, word-for-word, I’d say he leans harder into humor, by a long shot, than someone like Vonnegut, even. But almost all of it’s dead-pan, and some of it’s the sort of humor you get when someone who knows better does poorly on purpose, in calculated ways. If you ever think you’re laughing at him, not with… I reckon you’re probably wrong. What’s perhaps most miraculous about this turn-around is that I usually don’t enjoy comedic novels, but once I figured Dickens out, he works for me. (To your broader point—yeah, agreed that this sucks, good advice for bad writers becoming how most judge all writers has been harmful)
- spankibalt 11mo ago> "I'm the complete opposite." Very much the same; many a US writer's prose is terribly tedious, it comes across just as clinical as their HOA-approved suburban hellscapes. Somebody once told me a writer's job is also to expand language. It wasn't a US citizen.
- echelon_musk 11mo agoAre you an English speaking American? Because being a native English speaker and actually being English, or from a former English colony will differ. I'd characterise Americans as less pretentious and more straight talking. This kind flowery language is typical (or symptomatic depending on diagnosis) of how English people actually used to speak and write. The average English vocabulary has dwindled noticeably in my life.
- oasisbob 11mo agoAs a US student, clarity and simplicity was always emphasized when I was being taught to write. Never thought of Strunk & White as being distinctly American, but I guess you have a point.
- whimsicalism 11mo agoI think it has much more to do with porting the vernacular vs. formal register distinction common in other languages into english than how english people actually used to speak and write.
- matthewkayin 11mo agoIt's most likely that they are. As farfetched as this sounds, the CIA and the Iowa Writers' Workshop influenced American writing a great deal, encouraging writing to be taught in the "American" / Hemingway style. > “the American MFA system, spearheaded by the infamous Iowa Writers’ Workshop” as a “content farm” first designed to optimize for “the spread of anti-Communist propaganda through highbrow literature.” Its algorithm: “More Hemingway, less Dos Passos.” https://www.openculture.com/2018/12/cia-helped-shaped-american-creative-writing-famous-iowa-writers-workshop.html https://www.openculture.com/2018/12/cia-helped-shaped-americ...
- lupire 11mo agoDos Passos and Hemingway were both American. The CIA's problem with Dos Passos was that the was left-wing.
- phantasmish 11mo ago
- __lain__ 11mo agoHemingway was still a master of word choice. I recall an entire class spent on a few lines that conveyed a sense of heaviness to the scene. 'Plodding' was given a lot of attention.
- mjrpes 11mo agoI remember a college English class where a good part of the lecture was on this sentence from Big Two-Hearted River: "He liked to open cans." Forget the details but it got into the difference between achievement and accomplishment.
- itsamario 11mo agoOur legal systems are based around being concise and succinct, relevant, and objectively unbiased. I was raised to be respectful by "getting to the point, afap" to avoid wasting anybody's time. But I've noticed that mostly only the members of the science and legal community exercising similar principles.
- dTal 11mo ago> Our legal systems are based around being concise and succinct That's a good one. Got any more?
- wcfrobert 11mo agoWell there are two forms of writing, each serving a different purpose. (1) writing to communicate ideas, in which case simpler is almost always better. There's something hypnotic about simple writing (e.g. Paul Graham's essays) where information just flows frictionlessly into your head. (2) writing as a form of self-expression, in which case flowery and artistic prose is preferred. Here's a good David Foster Wallace quote in his interview with Bryan Garner: > "there’s a real difference between writing where you’re communicating to somebody, the same way I’m trying to communicate with you, versus writing that’s almost a well-structured diary entry where the point is [singing] “This is me, this is me!” and it’s going out into the world.
- HPsquared 11mo agoRich vocabulary allows a lot of meaning to be packed into short, simple structures. The words themselves carry the subtleties. It might take three or four simple words to convey the meaning of one uncommon word.
- mmooss 11mo ago> It might take three or four simple words to convey the meaning of one uncommon word. Or just find the appropriate 'simple' word, which is very often available.
- michaelt 11mo agoEven when communicating ideas, there's a simplicity/nuance trade-off to be made. I could say "Trump's unpredictable, seemingly irrational policy choices have alienated our allies, undermined trust in public institutions, and harmed the US economy" Or I could "The economy sucks and it's Trump's fault because he's dumb and an asshole" They both communicate the same broad idea - but which communicates it better? It depends on the audience.
- mmooss 11mo ago> They both communicate the same broad idea - but which communicates it better? It depends on the audience. Ugh. They say different things. The first describes the policy mechanisms and impacts. The second says nothing about those things; it describes your emotions. The biggest communication problem I see now is people, especially on the Internet, including on HN, use the latter for the former purpose and say nothing.
- biophysboy 11mo agoI also wonder if these unspoken rules were inherited from their more recent orality norms. Condensing an idea into a pithy, rhyming, statement w/ lots of colorful adjectives is a great way to preserve and transmit information w/o data loss in a pre-literate world.
- encroach 11mo agoIf you prefer a simpler style, then why did you write "the deeper I got into the world of literature" instead of "as I studied literature more"? Why did you say you were "pushed towards" simpler language instead of "I liked it more"? Why did you say "I feel the pain in my bones" and "drives me insane" instead of "I dislike it"? Why did you say "the big boy SAT words should pop out of the page unaccompanied" instead of "there should only be one big word per page"? Perhaps flowery language expands your ability to express yourself?
- layer8 11mo agoThese actually all mean different things.
- Guestmodinfo 11mo agoIt's a pain to read your reply because it's wrong. The poster you're replying to correctly wrote the phrases and you are trying to malign his or her painstaking work by such a low effort reply without explaining exactly where he or she is wrong
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- rippeltippel 11mo ago> Perhaps flowery language expands your ability to express yourself? What you call "flowery" is actually "expressive". Different words, although related, convey subtle differences in meaning. That's what literature (especially poetry) is about. I would add that our words define our world: a richer vocabulary leads to more articulated experiences. So, writing "flowery" sentences can actually denote someone capable of conveying the rich gradient of experience into words. I consider it as a plus.
- whstl 10mo agoIt's both of those, and more. It's "flowery" when you dislike it and "expressive" when you like it. It’s “overcomplicated” when you don’t get it and “nuanced” when you do. It’s “pretentious” when it annoys you and “ambitious” when it excites you. It’s “loud” when you hate it and “energetic” when you love it. Just like TFA, different people write differently and different people have different opinions.
- AnonymousPlanet 11mo ago> [...] I'm a native English speaker that studied writing in university [...] As a native English speaker who studied writing at university, do you think "who" should be used with people while "that" should only be used with things or the other way round. Or should I just not care? Edit: missing things
- elliotec 11mo agoYou should just not care. Both are acceptable, "that" is a little less formal and probably more common in everyday speech.
- AnonymousPlanet 11mo agoThanks. Is that true only for American English or other areas too? I've only noticed this the last couple of years on HN. Before that "who" and "that" were used more carefully. Or at least I had the feeling it was. Sometimes I wondered if it's just whatever people's autocomplete happens to spit out first.
- elliotec 11mo agoIt's true for all of English, even historically. Ignore the grammar police. The differentiation between "who" and "that" in this particular context is extremely low on the list of things you'll ever need to worry about.
- mmooss 11mo agoI think you might intend to compare 'that' and 'which'? Common advice is to use 'that' with people and 'which' with objects, though that isn't necessarily followed and omits many nuances. Use 'who' with people especially, often with other living beings ('my dog, who runs away daily, always is home for dinner') or groups of them ('the NY Yankees, who won the championship that year, were my favorite'), but never with objects unless pretending they live ('my stuffed bear, who sleeps in my bed, wakes me every morning'). If you care about these things, the Chicago Manual of Style is a large, technical, highly respected guide aimed at publishing. Fowler's Modern English Usage is more focused on usage. A short and beloved guide is The Elements of Style by Strunk & White. You can find all on the Internet Archive, I'm almost certain.
- munificent 11mo agoThe article itself does an excellent job spelling out the background: > This style has a history, of course, a history far older than the microchip: It is a direct linguistic descendant of the British Empire. The English we were taught was not the fluid, evolving language of modern-day London or California, filled with slang and convenient abbreviations. It was the Queen's English, the language of the colonial administrator, the missionary, the headmaster. It was the language of the Bible, of Shakespeare, of the law. It was a tool of power, and we were taught to wield it with precision. Mastering its formal cadences, its slightly archaic vocabulary, its rigid grammatical structures, was not just about passing an exam. > It was a signal. It was proof that you were educated, that you were civilised, that you were ready to take your place in the order of things. Much of writing style is not about conveying meaning but conveying the author's identity. And much of that is about matching the fashion of the group you want to be a member of. Fashion tends to go through cycles because once the less prestigious group becomes sufficiently skilled at emulating the prestige style, the prestigious need a new fashion to distinguish themselves. And if the emulated style is ostentatious and flowery, then the new prestige style will be the opposite. Aping Hemingway's writing style is in a lot of ways like $1,000 ripped jeans. It sort of says "I can look poor because I'm so rich I don't even have to bother trying to look rich." (I agree, of course, that there is a lot to be said for clean, spare prose. But writing without adverbs doesn't mean one necessarily has the clarity of thought of Hemingway. For many, it's just the way you write so that everyone knows you got educated in a place that told you to write that way.)
- meatmanek 11mo agoSometimes it's about matching the fashion of the group you aspire to be part of, sometimes it's about having that fashion imposed on you so you look "professional". Security guards at tech company offices are the only ones who wear suits, presumably because it's a mandated uniform, not by choice.
- whstl 10mo agoApocryphal, but someone once told me history of male grooming is an example of this: When only rich people could afford to shave, the fashion among the noble was to have a clean-shaved face to signal status, and poor people had beards. Once safety razors appeared, then the trend reverted.
- protocolture 11mo ago>I'm a native English speaker that studied writing in university I am a native english speaker who had to unlearn OP's writing style to pass my tertiary education. In particular I sat an english bridging course for non english speakers. I was often told off for "editorialising" and wasting space with useless descriptions.
- clevergadget 11mo agotil we go out of our way to make our writers boring...
- protocolture 11mo agoWell I wasnt studying narrative, but I wouldn't have been good at that either.
- chistev 11mo ago" Proceeded to" is wrong?
- komali2 10mo agoProbably not, I just find it annoying. Maybe because cops use it a lot.
- figassis 11mo agoFocus on short sentences and simplicity is an American trait. It is a bit different with UK English. As a native Portugese speaker, I spent my time before the US doing exactly the same as the author, I could write well structured prose by the time I was in 5th grade. I grew up with a dictionary. My mother would come back from work and ask me for the list of "difficult words". The expectation was that I spent time reading and would have found some new words, looked them up and now needed to sync with her to see if I got the correct meanings in the context where I found them. Then I moved to the US and noticed that even the books were sort of written in a way that required no extra effort. The English I learned while playing RPGs (with no speech at the time) was enough to read most books from the library and a dictionary was only needed occasionally. And everyone basically just knew the same set of words, youth and adults alike. I also noticed that US English has a distinct tendency of making up new words that are simpler and more intuitive than the original expressions. It turns things into verbs. This is why people Google, Tweet and Vibe. Then I went to an Engineering College, and it teaches us to distill everything into it's simpler fundamental components. I like it, and I now want people to be as direct as possible. As a non native english speaker, I've always had to speak and write better than native speakers, and always had to tolerate the "You speak/write really well, where are you from?". Today they no longer ask, AI is their answer and they judge accordingly.
- cryptonector 10mo agoIn British English there is a different approach to making up new words. Words like 'carpark' make me wince -- sure, it's more efficient than parking lot (though in Minnesota it's 'ramp', which is even more efficient). Not a fan. > Then I went to an Engineering College, and it teaches us to distill everything into it's simpler fundamental components. I like it, and I now want people to be as direct as possible. I've not quite yet gotten to the "and now I want people to be as direct as possible stage", but occasionally I've had to deal with exceedingly elliptical writing (and speech!) and then -yes- I feel exactly that. English is my third language, and my first two are Romance languages. Over in Europe and parts of LatAm florid language is prized, as you know. I had to unlearn that stuff.
- torginus 10mo agoI'm not from the US, but I've heard that in high-school classes, essays are graded on breadth of vocabulary, and sentence complexity, going as far as mechanically assigning part of the grade based on a formula that measures how many different words you used and how long your sentences were. Perhaps my info is out of date on this? Afair, the underlying idea is 'grade reading level', as in longer sentences with difficult words being more difficult to read, which I think mistakenly got turned into the idea, that if your prose is would get assigned a higher reading grade, that would make it more sophisticated. I'm sure many kids who are actually into reading, having read tons of books written by professional authors recognize the flaws of this approach and actively suffer because of it. Perhaps their first attempts at writing fiction for their own sake is somewhat influenced by this guidance, which they have to unlearn. Strange that in college, they do a 180 on these demands and they want students to write in sentences that are as short as possible. Which once again, is perhaps partially due to making students unlearn the bad behaviors drilled into them in high-school, but I feel like this is like committing the same mistake, but in the other direction.
- neves 10mo agoFunny that in science fiction robotic voices were always the ones without adverbs and adjectives
- joseda-hg 10mo agoThere's a bit of a perceptory gap. If a Native bends the language it comes accross as intentional. If (For example) I do with my heavy accented ESL it usually comes accoss as lack of competency. Same goes for simple language, y'all get the benefit of assumed fluency, we usually do not
- eudamoniac 10mo agoI don't know why literature has the unique property among the arts that it must be puréed into rapidly digestible slush. Many here have already defended merits of connotative precision, so I shan't, but what of artistic precision? Language can innervate the soul with beauty, lilt with the lyrical pleasure of song, or revolt the senses. Shall the painter lock away his varied pigments? Shall the blue notes never sound? Limpid prose lacks those tongue-delighting tannins. I mourn each word ferried across the river Archaic.
- MrSkelter 10mo agoThis is a uniquely American obsession. I am English and from a well educated upper middle class family. When I moved to the US I was staggered to find my language being corrected by people taught that specific words were overly complicated and that any sentence over a handful of words was excess. It seemed that Hemingway was credited as Shakespeare and Americans all now lived in his very limited world. (Don’t even get me started on the nonsense promoted by Strunk and White). Like the poster I am also accused of writing like an LLM because I use constructions that aren’t simple and more than the first page of punctuation symbols. The irony is that the machines have been trained on the world of English language writing and the complaints come from people who find the breadth of it intimidating. LLMs were trained on all English text. Much of it from my home, the home of the language. Much more from the children of empire educated to write like Englishmen. Chat GPT is thus biased toward native English and upsetting people who want it to adopt the American dialect/patois. America, a country with a majority of non English speaking immigrants over time, has developed a dialect that’s been simplified for ease of learning; undergirded with local rules which aren’t part of native English, and aren’t reflected in English writing. It’s as if Canadians insisted that Quebecois French was the standard. Or Mexicans stated that Spanish is written only as they speak. I often see, my now fellow, Americans struggle not to split an infinitive—pointlessly as it’s perfectly cromulent and correct. Or waste words describing something for which a word already exists. The illusion of efficiency in Hemingway’s style is just that. It works for him because he isn’t being required to convey anything he doesn’t want to. Look it (as my relatives confounding say) LLMs often write poorly but they should not be criticized for writing like an educated, global, English speaker.