[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.

[mikeash]

How much do you suppose a person would get out of Up Goer Five if they didn’t already know about Apollo and such?

[gonehome]

That’s fair - at the extreme end it is probably harder to understand.

Though going back to the first comment it’s also not how people talk.

[the_af]

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