5 ms·
Obsession with short sentences and generally pushing extreme simplicity of structure and word choice has been terrible for English prose. It’s not been terrible
by phantasmish 10mo ago
Obsession 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 10mo 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 10mo ago[deleted]
- dgan 10mo 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 10mo agoPeople don't discuss how people walk in daily conversation, so it's a word primarily encountered in literature, and more common in specific types of literature (like romance novels to describe how a man paces about with swagger).
- aleph_minus_one 10mo ago> I 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 I am also not a native English speaker, but I got to know the verb to "to stride" from The Lord of the Rings: Aragorn is originally introduced under the name "Strider": > https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Aragorn&oldid=1327237194 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Aragorn&oldid=132... "Aragorn is a fictional character and a protagonist in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Aragorn is a Ranger of the North, first introduced with the name Strider and later revealed to be the heir of Isildur, an ancient King of Arnor and Gondor."
- gertlex 10mo agoI wonder if you've heard the expression "hitting your stride". (native english speaker who was a bookworm as a kid; I admittedly had to ask gemini to recall the general phrase that I had in mind)
- dgan 10mo agoNope, never heard!
- GMoromisato 10mo ago"He walked up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'" "He strode up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'" "He sidled up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'" "He tromped up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'" Each of those sentences conveys as slightly different action. You can almost imagine the person's face has a different expression in each version. Yes, I hate it when amateurs just search/replace by thesaurus. But I think different words have different connotations, even if they mean roughly the same thing. Writing would be poorer if we only ever used "walk".
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- mr_00ff00 10mo agoFeel like this debate might be way different for novel writing vs every day writing. I’m biased because I am not a very good writer, but I can see why in a book you might want to hint at how someone walked up to someone else to illustrate a point. When writing articles to inform people, technical docs, or even just letters, don’t use big vocabulary to hint at ideas. Just spell it out literally. Any other way of writing feels like you are trying to be fancy just for the sake of seeming smart.
- toss1 10mo ago>> Just spell it out literally. Spelling it out literally is precisely what the GP is doing in each of the example sentences — literally saying what the subject is doing, and with the precision of choosing a single word better to convey not only the mere fact of bipedal locomotion, but also the WAY the person walked, with what pace, attitude, and feeling. This carries MORE information about in the exact same amount of words. It is the most literal way to spell it out. A big part of good writing is how to convey more meaning without more words. Bad writing would be to add more clauses or sentences to say that our subject was confidently striding, conspiratorially sidling, or angrily tromping, and adding much more of those sentences and phrases soon gets tiresome for the reader. Better writing carries the heavier load in the same size sentence by using better word choice, metaphor, etc. (and doing it without going too far the other way and making the writing unintelligibly dense). Think of "spelling it out literally" like the thousand-line IF statements, whereas good writing uses a more concise function to produce the desired output.
- next_xibalba 10mo agoHaving read a fair amount of Faulkner, I have to respectfully disagree. Or, at least, point out that are diminishing returns to flowery, complex writing.
- somenameforme 10mo agoThe internet has been even worse. We tend to speak literally and simply. And I don't really know why that is. Perhaps it's because if there's something beyond the overt, it might go completely missed. For instance Mark Twain is basically full of endless amazing quotes with lovely nuance, yet in contemporary times how many people would miss the meaning in a statement like "Prosperity is the best protector of principle"? I can already see people raging over his statement, taken at face value. Downvote the classist!
- komali2 10mo ago"Prosperity is the best protector of principle" taken out of context can be used in many ways, including by a rich person arguing that rich people have better morals, and poor people have worse ones, and that's why they're poor. The context is really necessary.
- somenameforme 10mo agoWhether one is trying to use it literally or ironically, it means the exact same thing. The only question is whether the speaker and the reader understand what it means. And in fact in this case there was no context at all in Twain's original usage - it was the epigraph for a chapter in this work. [1] And that's what I mean in that modern writing, on the internet - though rapidly leaking into 'real life', has become highly infantilized where we assume everybody reading is an idiot, and speak accordingly which, in turn, infantilizes and 'idiotizes' our own speech, and simply makes it far more bland and less expressive. Interestingly, this is not ubiquitous. In other cultures, including on the internet, there remains much more use of irony, and more general nuance in speech. I suspect a big part of the death of English fluency was driven by political correctness - zomg what if somebody interprets what I'm saying the wrong way!?! [1] - https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2895/2895-h/2895-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2895/2895-h/2895-h.htm
- PunchyHamster 10mo agoAnother annoying fact is that using a bit rarer words sometimes triggers weirdos into thinking you somehow want to brag or use that kind of language to "look smarter". Like a crab bucket for language.
- osener 10mo agoI have a confession to make. I hope ChatGPT starts writing only short sentences. Punchy one-liners. One thought per line. So marketers finally realize this does not work. And stop sending me junk emails written like this.