[gonehome]

This seems like a perfect example of someone who needs to read pg’s essay “write like you talk”: http://paulgraham.com/talk.html

I don’t get an intelligence vibe from this style of writing - it mostly just sets off my bullshit alarms.

[dang]

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19741077 and marked it off-topic.

[coldtea]

You should use those alarms on PG's writings:

https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm

As for the particular author, he was born in another culture (not all cultures appreciate the matter-of-factness as-you-talk anglo-saxon style of writing, many prominent European writers have called it "barbaric" and "only good for business"). He was also born in a whole other era.

[pthomas551]

Yep, it's extremely mistaken (but very American) to assume that American preferences on writing style prevail in all other languages and regions. To take one example, in written German the passive voice is often considered better style, whereas in contemporary English it's the exact opposite.

[dpark]

> many prominent European writers have called it "barbaric" and "only good for business"

Snobs in general tend to look down on people who don’t place value on pomposity for its own sake.

[foldr]

Writing style is a matter of taste. The blunt "as spoken" style is just as much an affect as some of its more flowery alternatives.

[dpark]

I'm assuming you're using "an affect" in the sense of "an affectation" or "affected" here, in which case, no. Plainness, simplicity, straightforwardness are words that would describe "as spoken" writing. They are also literally antonyms of "affect" in this context, which would mean pretentiousness, artificiality, pomposity.

[foldr]

I just mean that there's nothing inherently sincere about plainness and simplicity. Some people adopt a plain and simple style disingenuously, and others write in a more flowery style out of a genuine aesthetic motive. In French, 100 years ago, the kind of style you're advocating would have been the "marked" case. That is, readers would probably have attributed disingenuous motives to someone who chose to write a history book in the style of spoken conversation.

[dpark]

> * That is, readers would probably have attributed disingenuous motives to someone who chose to write a history book in the style of spoken conversation.*

Okay, but they'd also probably be able to understand it. So, tradeoffs.

[coldtea]

>Plainness, simplicity, straightforwardness are words that would describe "as spoken" writing. They are also literally antonyms of "affect" in this context, which would mean pretentiousness, artificiality, pomposity.

"Spoken writing" can be just as artificial and pretentious -- e.g. upper class writers writing as if they grew up in da hood. Or people dumbing down their language to sell more.

How we speak with a friend, and how we write, doesn't have to share the same language or tone or expressions or vocabulary even. Spoken is a stream of consciousness that we express in real time. Written is forever, so we have time to refine what we write, go deeper, be more artistic, add flourishes, and so on. This is not the same as "being obscure for being obscure's sake".

To make an analogy, what you ask for, in photography terms would be "all photography should be real life documentary-style scenes".

In fact, even "spoken" changes form all the time: you don't talk to your bong buddy the same as you talk to your parents, or spouse, or the same way you give a lecture as when you casual chat over coffee, or when you teach students. Tone changes, expression changes, vocabulary changes, level of difficulty changes, etc.

[colechristensen]

>Snobs in general tend to look down on people who …

That in itself is snobbery. It's just fashion bouncing back and forth between hating on the poor and hating on the rich. One is fashionable until everyone does it then the opposite is in vogue.

Are the cool kids today wearing factory-ripped jeans these days or are they hating on people who do?

It is just stupid to say "this style is the only acceptable style and anyone doing anything different is an asshole". Surface quality is boring, substance is important.

[dpark]

> It is just stupid to say "this style is the only acceptable style and anyone doing anything different is an asshole".

It isn't stupid. It's snobbery. If you denigrate straightforward writing as "barbaric", you're a snob, plain and simple.

> Surface quality is boring, substance is important.

My problem with overly-flowery writing is specifically that it's about style and not substance. If your goal is to educate or to entertain, put that first. If your goal is to impress the reader with your loquacious conveyance of verbiage, fine, but you're sacrificing substance for style. And I personally think this sort of writing shows a disrespect toward the reader, because it's literally about the author showing off and trying to impress the reader.

You know how sometimes you'll go to a website and it hijacks your scrollbar to show some unnecessary visualization or a gratuitous rotating 3D view of a product? And you look at it and you can appreciate the artistry that went into creating the visualization, the skill that went into rendering everything perfectly and syncing it with the scrollbar. But mostly it's fucking obnoxious because you just want to scroll down to read the article or click the "buy" link and instead you're wasting your time fighting with the site that broke your scrollbar because some product manager was sure you'd be impressed. This is the website version of dense, flowery, self-important prose.

[coldtea]

>If you denigrate straightforward writing as "barbaric", you're a snob, plain and simple.

It's "straightforward" for you and your era and culture. For others it's merely a plain and crude version of what could be better writing.

[colechristensen]

>My problem with overly-flowery writing is specifically that it's about style and not substance.

There is the snobbery. Bad writing is everywhere. Some people have large vocabularies and use them well, some people don't. Becoming a good writer also requires a lot of bad writing. Complex writing more so. If you say everything complex is just about style and showing off, it reflects poorly on your ability to determine quality of complex, or any writing.

There is nothing wrong with not understanding something or having no interest in something, but doing this virtue signaling to put yourself above anything you don't understand is anti-intellectual bullshit and you might as well be protesting against vaccines. It's the same as black kids shaming each other for "talking white" or people yelling about how "we speak English in this country".

[dpark]

"You have a different opinion from me. Therefore you are a snob." Boo. You brought up style and substance, and when I answered you called me a snob. This is not what snobbery means. It is not snobbery to hold an opinion. Nor is is snobbery to think something is bad if you have reasons.

If you don't like to listen to bubblegum pop, that doesn't make you a snob. If you argue that the lyrics are simple and the repetitive beats basic chord progressions are unoriginal or pandering to the crowd, that still doesn't make you a snob. But if you say that anyone who makes or listens to bubblegum pop is an idiot, now you're a snob. Snobbery isn't disliking something. It's looking down on something (or more practically on people who like that something.)

I don't think people who write flowery, dense prose are all snobs, nor did I say that they were. I said the ones who do this and then call straightforward writing "barbaric" are snobs, because "barbaric" is not a meaningful criticism, any more than "idiotic" is.

I gave you specific reasons I do not like the flowery style of writing, and why I find it counterproductive. I think writing in this way is very self-important and I think it puts the reader secondary to the author's ego. I think flowery writing has poor fit for purpose, if the purpose is to educate or even entertain. If the purpose is to demonstrate artistry in sentence composition, then sure, flowery writing seems great for that purpose, but I personally have zero interest in that purpose, and I think most people probably have zero interest in that. Slogging through three times as much text and reading every paragraph twice to make sure I understood the point is not a rewarding experience for me.

[coldtea]

And cruder people in general tend to consider pomposity what's just eloquence or refined prose.

Besides, for many people there's nothing wrong with what some call "snobbery" but they call elitism or quality or high brow, etc.

They're not "snobs" caring who has this or that ancestry, who has expensive clothes, etc., but particular about language, expression, etc. Which is par for the course of being a writer, artist, or intellectual in general.

[colechristensen]

First, it is a century old translation from French. What might sound perfectly normal in French might sound silly in English if you do a literal translation. Matching the tone between languages might significantly change the message.

For example, to use the English versions of French words...

To say "I'm sorry" in French you say "I am desolate"

Talking about a broken phone or a stomach ache you would say they are deranged.

Much of French vocabulary came into English but very often with some distance in meanings and usage. Often in translating you have the option to use exactly the same word with maybe a small spelling change, but you end up sounding ridiculous because of the shift in meaning or intensity.

Second, essentially what boils down to shaming people for not communicating the way you want is wrong. Not that I am saying you are directly or intentionally harassing someone, but (despite my distaste for how it is often used) things like this could be called microaggressions, making people uncomfortable using their language.

I experienced a lot of that growing up. In a place far from cities where people were generally less educated (and those that were left to find jobs) and I read a lot. I still struggle with the unconscious bias that people don't want to hear what I have to say or wouldn't understand or would respond with discouraging things.

Looking back, I'm not trying to say you are doing anything particularly negative, BUT be careful. Diversity can come in lots of ways, using language a little differently is one of them, and a little understanding (like how hundred year translations from French are going to sound a little … florid) helps with perspective.

[antidesitter]

> shaming people for not communicating the way you want is wrong

No. It's not always wrong.

[javert]

> what boils down to shaming people for not communicating the way you want is wrong

Which is exactly what the second half of your post is, but moreso than the person you are criticizing.

There is no point in having a discussion board if people are going to be criticized because something they said with sincerity might offend somebody. That is the nature of speech.

[sls]

The second half of his post is not a critique of how the point to which he responds was communicated, but of the point itself. He's saying that the message "people shouldn't write like that" is problematic and flawed, not that it itself shouldn't have been written like it was.

As to your second point, that any speech at all might offend someone so there's no point in drawing attention to that fact, on the contrary, the commenter is actually making a very concrete point. He is talking about a very specific thing, that this prescriptivism about writing style alienates and turns away a lot of people that could otherwise make valuable contributions. It's not a general statement that any statement might offend somebody, but a highly targeted examination of the consequences of such speech policing.

[mikeash]

That’s good advice but it’s also highly dependent on culture and time. It’s food advice because the English-speaking culture of today values writing that sounds like speech. It may not have been good advice at all for someone writing in 1920s France. And beyond that, it’s really hard to apply this sort of advice to a translation.

[pthomas551]

Yeah, written English corresponds to spoken English more than in a lot of other languages, where the vocabulary and grammar can vary considerably between the written and spoken word.

[the_af]

> written English corresponds to spoken English more than in a lot of other languages

Except for pronunciation! ;)

[gunnihinn]

> It’s food advice because the English-speaking culture of today values writing that sounds like speech.

And lord forbid us for writing in a way or about subjects that don't please as much of the potential readers as possible. They might not click on our data-mined ads if we did. The fucks.

[gonehome]

I’d argue it’s good advice for people that value clarity over sounding smart.

I’d guess there were people that valued this in most times and cultures.

[foldr]

The quoted text isn't at all unclear (especially taking into consideration the fact that it's a translation).

[gonehome]

The quoted text is verbose and tedious. It uses a lot of complex words to convey little information, both of these things negatively affect clarity.

You may have a preference for purple prose, but it's silly to pretend that the quoted text is clear.

I'm suspicious when people write like that because it can be used to hide bad reasoning behind unnecessarily complex word choice and sentence structure. If you care about sharing ideas it's better to write simply.

[foldr]

That's a very absolutist take on it. I genuinely don't find the text difficult to read or light on information. In fact I think it makes a very interesting point. You've also got to take into account that it's a translation of a French text written almost 100 years ago.

> If you care about sharing ideas it's better to write simply.

That's good advice if you're writing blog posts in 2019 with the goal of driving traffic to your site. And why should any writer aspire to a higher goal than that?

[mikeash]

Someone in another time and place may well find complex word choice and sentence structure easiest to understand in written form, and is wary of writing that uses plain language because it can be used to hide bad reasoning behind simple-sounding words and sentence structure.

For you, and the culture you’re in, what you say is true. It is far from universal.

[gonehome]

I guess I don’t agree.

I’d be willing to bet that simpler is generally easier to understand than complex. Maybe some exceptions exist, but I’d suspect they’d be outliers.

[the_af]

Can you point to an example of purple prose in the text? I'm curious because I don't see any.

[phillipcarter]

Writing that is intentionally eloquent, clever, intricate, etc. isn't inherently bad and most certainly need not adhere to the gospel of some arbitrary Venture Capitalist in silicon valley.

If your goal is to communicate your company or product; sure, keep it simple. But that's not everyone's goals, irrespective of culture or time period.

[dpark]

Yes and no. It’s valid that values change and perhaps in the past this sort of dense, self-important prose was the preferred way to write. No doubt many even today would say it sounds more intelligent or educated. However, if the goal is to write in a legible, understandable, comprehensible way, then this has never been a good way to do that. (Indeed, many scholarly works are still written this way, and they are far less accessible as a result. People might feel smarter for reading them but they probably get less from them than if they were written simply.)

As for the translation, I’m not clear when this was actually translated. The stuff I’ve found indicates a publishing date if 1999. If that’s accurate (and it well may not be) then I think it’s entirely reasonable to expect translators to write easy-to-read text in a modern style. I understand the desire to carry the “spirit” of the work through the translation, but I’m not sure that’s what’s at fault when translations read this way. I wonder if translators enamored with the work are trying to use difficult phrasing to make it seem more impressive or educated. I also wonder if sometimes native sentence structure is being replicated in English, where it comes off try-hard when it’s really just an awkward transliteration.

[EliRivers]

Having read the article, I disagree. What "style" of writing? The sentences aren't excessive, the language is all fairly common (the author even takes pleasure in simplifying "scramasax", clearly inviting us to take pleasure in it as well). What's wrong with it?

It's not meant to be a list of purely literal facts. It's entertaining and a pleasure to read.

As for Paul Graham's opinion piece; well, that's just silly. Something written is inherently different to something spoken; they have different strengths, different attributes, different purposes and, should they have the same goal, can best achieve that goal in different ways. Why choose to discard the strengths of the written?

[ABCLAW]

The first paragraph of the quoted piece is a nightmare. The first sentence of the second and third paragraph are poorly drafted as well. In the rest, the verbose recounting fits the theme and does not distract from the point.

As a writing exercise, let me re-write the piece:

"What happened during the Middle Ages is unclear and the evidence we use to understand it is contradictory. Reviews depict the period as one filled with conflict and struggle, but artistic works dated to this period - from the calm, serene looking statues to the expansive, aspirational Gothic architecture - instead hint that they were created by happy people in a flourishing society.

Perhaps the lack of recorded history in this period is the result of peace and a lack of notable incidents rather than war, famine and disease."

The idea is interesting but bite-sized when stripped of the pomp.

[EliRivers]

The first paragraph of the quoted piece is a nightmare.

Mmm... use of the word "nightmare" to criticise something that's discussing the dark ages, where the critique is about just that kind of skill level, but then you go on to present a junior grade summary. Deep troll or accidental writing ability? Too close to call.

But that illuminates a fundmental part of the problem here. To many on both sides of the page, much writing is also a game, to be played by the reader and the author. It's meant to be fun, but if one doesn't realise it's a game to be played and that the game is itself another layer of meaning, one will simply end up getting annoyed, wondering why the author didn't just present a plain list of unadorned facts.

By all means, don't play the game if you don't want to, or critique the game as one plays - point out literary shots that didn't get over the line, or cross-language allusions that are playing a bit fast and loose with etymology.

But to see the game being played and tell people to stop playing it? That's not right.

[ABCLAW]

You're replying after the quoted paragraph was snipped from the thread, so I'm not sure if you actually read my post with the full context.

The original paragraph was: "Paradoxical in its manifestations, disconcerting in its signs, the Middle Ages proposes to the sagacity of its admirers the resolution of a singular misconception. How to reconcile the unreconcilable? How to adjust the testimony of the historical facts to that of medieval art works?"

This paragraph is obfuscated at best, unintelligible at worst. This is a fairly common writing style in continental philosophy, and in that field the debate isn't whether or not the writing is bad. It's whether or not the writing is intentionally bad.

[foldr]

>It's not meant to be a list of purely literal facts. It's entertaining and a pleasure to read.

[dpark]

Fossuser’s criticism was not directed at the article at all. It was directed at the Fulcanelli quote given by ohaideredevs.

The Dwellings if Philosophers (as translated) starts out with “Paradoxical in its manifestations, disconcerting in its signs, the Middle Ages proposes to the sagacity of its admirers the resolution of a singular misconception.” This says so little with such absurd wording that it’s almost word soup.

[the_af]

Which words seem absurd and word soup to you? "Paradoxical"? "Sagacity"? "Manifestation"? "Resolution" Perhaps because Spanish is my first language, none of those seem purple prose or difficult to me. They are very straightforward, with the possible exception of "paradoxical": most people who don't read books don't know what it means. For example "sagaz" (someone who displays sagacity) is a very common word to us; Samwise Gamgee from Lord of the Rings is called Samsagaz in the Spanish translation.

Now if you're going to argue all Latin-based and Romance languages are less straightforward than English, that's a riskier (and dismissive!) proposition.

[Sharlin]

I'd say "Sagacity" is definitely a very rare word in English, certainly less common than "paradoxical". It is often the case in English that a Romance loan is considerably more high-brow than its Germanic synonym ("wisdom" in this case).

(I'm not a native speaker either, though.)

[dpark]

The problem is not merely with the words chosen but they way they're stitched together. Someone else tried to rewrite it without the over-the-top flowery language and it's far more concise despite still not being particularly minimalist.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19741886

>60% reduction in content for a single off-the-cuff rewrite implies the original work needs an aggressive editor with an aggressive amount of red ink.

[the_af]

The rewrite, while simpler and arguably clearer, also seems more boring to me. It doesn't engage my imagination.

In any case, the original doesn't set off my "bullshit detectors". Such an aggressive way of commenting on a piece of writing! Not everyone must or should write like Hemingway -- not even Hemingway!

[dpark]

That's fair and maybe it is more boring. It was, after all, an off-the-cuff rewrite by some random person on HN. It wasn't written to demonstrate the ideal way to present the argument, but as a way of showing that the original used a whole lot of words to say not that much.

[foldr]

If you read carefully, the rewrite leaves out a lot of the content. For example, the original text claims that "all the Gothic buildings without exception reflect a serenity and expansiveness and a nobility without equal". That claim simply isn't reproduced in the rewrite. Nor, to take another example, is that claim that certain monuments were built "in the enthusiasm of a powerful inspiration of ideal and faith".

[dpark]

The rewrite leaves out a lot of words. The bits you've quoted don't actually say much, which is rather the point. If you take the quoted bits literally, the first is absurd (all Gothic buildings, really?) and both are begging the question because they already assume the premise is correct. There's precisely nothing that demonstrates that Gothic buildings are reflecting the serenity of society, nor that monuments are accurately portraying an idealistic or faithful society. It's a whole lot of not content.

[topynate]

The only phrase which really is "too French" here is "proposes to the sagacity of its admirers". (It's not wrong, but not many English speakers still use "propose" in its sense of "set before someone as a goal".) Other than that, I see a well-balanced sentence in which every word has a purpose – but "well-balanced" versus "straight-forward" is a matter of taste.

[dpark]

Every time I read that sentence I can't help but picture some huckster standing on a soap box at an intersection in an impoverished neighborhood in the 30s. It's so clearly crafted to impress rather than inform that I can't help but feel a sales pitch is coming.

[foldr]

Well, yeah, which just goes to show that you're interpreting a work written by a French alchemist in 1929 in an American cultural context where everything is some kind of sales pitch - which is why you're getting the wrong end of the stick.

[incog-neato]

I agree that's the most cumbersome phrase. But I think the difficulty people are perceiving here is more in the grammar being difficult to parse rather than in the vocabulary being florid.

[UnhelpfulYoda]

I think the issue is that the author doesn't establish a clear thesis from the very beginning. Additionally, the bizarre nature of the thesis and long run-on sentences only serve to confuse the reader as to what it is exactly that he is trying prove or disprove.

[dragonwriter]

PG’s essay is good advice for modern American culture when addressing what it is explicitly framed as being for: maximizing the number of people who will read through your writing.

It may not be ideal for other goals, including maximizing utility of your work (or persuasiveness z for persuasive writing) to people who do read it. Different forms of expression between writing and speech, which differences are also different by purposes and intended audience of the writing, have evolved for real reasons.

[gp7]

When you write like this a lot, you end up talking like it, too.

[hluska]

I can’t claim to be a big fan of Fulcanelli’s, but in the same text, he talked about how philosophers would communicate with ciphers. I have absolutely no proof of this, but wouldn’t put it above Fulcanelli to embed coded messages in his writing, or to write in a way that suggests a cipher. Again, I have no proof, other than that he fancied himself the man who rediscovered alchemy in the 20th century and, since many alchemists embedded codes in their writing, I can see him playing the part.

[ohaideredevs]

It's a common theme - that it's all a very clever cipher - that the metals, planet alignments, etc are either code for chemical reactions or "transformations of the soul." I got into it as a teenager, but called it quits at some point, because while Fulcanelli is vague, he is at least a competent human being. That much can't be said for the authors of most "alchemical", and similar, texts.

Also, it's funny to track the biographies of the most commonly known Occultists; Crowley, Dee, Parsons - all accomplished before they got into the occult, and declining after.

[ohaideredevs]

I understand where you are coming from, but this guy came off as intelligent to me DESPITE all the alarms going of. That's not to say he wasn't trolling.

[the_af]

What is specifically triggering your bullshit alarms? I'm intrigued. I like to think my own bs alarms are very sensitive, but in this particular case they remain silent; the prose seems only mildly flowery to me, and no assertion seems like pseudoscience or quakery.

[maldusiecle]

There are people who talk like that. What's your problem with it in particular? I don't find any of its sentences especially difficult to parse.

[byproxy]

I think I'd rather talk like I write.

That is, if I can improve my writing significantly...

[selimthegrim]

Wait until you get ahold of Fomenko