[coliveira]

This is a problem with most advice on English writing. They only teach you how to write as at a level that a 8 years old reader would understand. Most modern books, fiction or not, are written at a juvenile level, at the formal request of publishers. As a result, the level of reading and comprehension for most people has decreased to a level that is lower than in any other literate society.

[JoshCole]

> they only teach you how to write as at a level that a 8 years old reader would understand.

Many if not most modern writing advice will remind you to focus on your audience. Most audiences aren't composed of eight year olds. So it isn't true that most advice suggests writing for eight year olds.

> As a result, the level of reading and comprehension for most people has decreased to a level that is lower than in any other literate society.

We track statistics like reading comprehension and you can look them up. I did. The source I found showed that every state in the US I checked - with the exception of Michigan (??) - has reading comprehension improve relative to the year 2003. In some cases this improvement is by a notable amount, in some cases not so notable.

It seems unlikely to me that people now are worse at reading and writing than people used to be. Writing is more common now and reading is more common too. Once, journalists wrote. Now everyone does.

[ghaff]

>So it isn't true that most advice suggests writing for eight year olds.

That may be true although I can tell you from personal experience that writing optimizers for places like trade press sites absolutely push you towards more basic language, shorter sentences, etc. One site in particular I used to write for sometimes told me every single time that I should basically dumb down my prose. And I don't write in a particularly literary way and I've pretty much never had this feedback from human editors.

>Once, journalists wrote. Now everyone does.

Interesting observation. At one point, most business people above a certain level were "writing" by dictating to their secretaries which is a completely different mode of getting information onto a page.

[JoshCole]

I believe you. Medium is the message is a term from media theory. It refers to the idea that messages aren't in a vacuum, but are shaped by where they are transmitted. Often that shape is a function of what the audience will find appealing. You can tie this sort of thing to bellman equations to get a mathematical grip on the effect.

It does exist. It can be as harmful as you think it is. Yet it isn't harmful everywhere - isn't the world at large without any variation. It is intimately tied to the environment you are in, because that environment produces the rewards. Different environment, different reward, different impact on your writing. The effect is local, not global.

Which means you get to have a superpower.

When you have a bad transformation that degrades thinking that makes the term "medium is the message" feel dangerous. So you get things like Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. I think your post is an example of the same type of fear. This focus - on the examples of times where things are negative - it misses the opportunity. Since messages are a function not of raw ideas, but of their audiences you have an incredible power. Choose the right audience. Set the expectation for evaluation in advance. Pick the medium that helps you to think clearly and makes it easy to be judged. Now, instead of being destroyed by your incentive environment, you get empowered by it.

Take a look at Amazon's writing culture for an example of that. Or more broadly, the many companies which chose to ban powerpoint for reasons which are fundamentally related to what I'm talking about. We're not worse at understanding writing than ever before. We're more advanced than ever before, because we stand atop the giants that came before us. Yet at the same time - we're not, because that too is local and not global. The future is often already here, but isn't evenly distributed.

[DiggyJohnson]

I think you’re both making good points in this thread. I’m writing a non-fiction book in my spare time, and I’ve had to face the fact that my default get-words-on-the-page is extremely flowery.

Would it be possible for you share an example of your prose that received this criticism?

[ghaff]

Basically anything here had the Wordpress plug-in whining:

https://www.techtarget.com/contributor/Gordon-Haff

And that's probably after I made a few token changes to make the plug-in happier.

[DiggyJohnson]

Very interesting, thanks for sharing.