[turkey99]

It’s an interesting topic but I find the article’s writing style impenetrable.

For example:

> The polish applied in adjectival designation inclines one to believe that a definition has been achieved, a conclusion won. A pile of qualities furnishes a synoptic view of the whole, and so begins the slippage from the conditional mood to the declarative.

Sorry, me too dumb to parse. This is just one sentence picked at random

[seabass-labrax]

I think that, with phrases like "applied in adjectival designation" and "conditional mood to the declarative", this is the author subconsciously admitting that he'd rather have been a research fellow in linguistics than in culture!

[timeagain]

Ok I enjoyed the article as a piece of self-indulgence. I agree it is pretentious and I don’t write like that. But just for funsies:

“Once your ‘personality type’ has been found, it feels like you know something definitive about who you are. You only answered some small number of questions about small segments of your life, but the quiz authoritatively asserts it has seen you to the core. In this way the quiz turns ‘when X happens I do Y’ statements into ‘I am X kind of person so I always do Y’ statements. This is probably bad.”

[mjfisher]

"Once you describe something, people tend to believe the description is complete in all cases over time"

Just bad writing.

[throwanem]

Bad reading, rather say. The impatience is typically qualified as that of men (it is always men) with too much on their hands and not enough time, but eventually the impression becomes inescapable of the infant in a high chair mewling for the next spoonful of baby food.

Besides, it's a bit rich to complain of excess length after the author has handed you his entire thesis by the end of the second paragraph. If you keep going after that despite not caring for the style, you're either a glutton for punishment or not paying attention.

[mjfisher]

If you assume a starting point that writing is to communicate clearly (as in delivering a thesis or argument) and your writing does not do that, then it's bad writing.

You might not want to assume that. There are other reasons to write ambiguously with excessive and unnecessary ornamentation:

* Everyone else in your field does it, and you want to write in a familiar style

* You hope people confuse the advanced vocabulary in your writing with an advanced argument and it will bolster your credibility

* Pretension: you want to feel clever whilst writing it, or appeal to those who will feel clever whilst reading it

All of those are perfectly valid to my mind - even writing verbosely for the sheer love of the language is fine.

I just don't think this article does any of that well.

[throwanem]

Oh, it does pretension very well, as it should given the market in which and to whom it's published. The Hedgehog Review appeals to aspirant biens-pensants of a notionally resurgent school of cultural conservatism notionally in the mold of Mencken and Buckley. Which is a sad joke, of course; say what you would of either man, both knew the value of firm principle, and of concision in honing the sharp side of a tongue. But however footless the pretense, it should be pretty well gratified by an article that takes the parable of the blind men and the elephant and dresses it up in five thousand or so mostly unnecessary additional words. (The effort at history is at least justifiable, if little more usefully pursued.)

What galls me is really just the lack of critical engagement. Whining about an article being "too long" is the tantrum of a Tiktok-addled child. Complaints that add up only to "this isn't meant for me" are well suited to the self-centeredness of a teenager. The questions of who this is for, then, and why, and what that might say about something else, are actually interesting, and around here somewhat tiresomely rare in the asking.

[sandspar]

You seem to have a remarkably uncharitable view of your discussion partner.

[throwanem]

It worries me that people are comfortable in declaring themselves unwilling or unable to read critically, or to reckon with a thought of any complexity. I realize that's not what they understand themselves to be doing, but it is what they're doing nonetheless.

[kstenerud]

I made the mistake of reading the entire article, expecting some kind of structure and conclusion. But it just rambled on for pages and pages in this same obtuse and verbose manner, like a Grandpa Simpson with a few more IQ points but the same strength of mind.

[AlbertCory]

Thanks for pinpointing it. There was something about this I just found offputting. Like the author's trying too hard.

Interestingly enough, I'm finishing up an article about open office plans and return-to-office, and I realized that the people who decide these things are overwhelmingly Extroverted, in MBTI terms. They think those Introverted types who like some private space to think need to be dragged out into the open where they can Communicate.

There actually are scholarly articles about which MBTI types should be leaders and managers. I won't burden you with them here.

[torlok]

It reminds me of how Eric Weinstein talks. It's either a complete lack of communication skills, or will to actually share knowledge, just an attempt to make what you're talking about seem impenetrable. It's a sad display of intellectual insecurity by the author.

[mistersquid]

> It’s an interesting topic but I find the article’s writing style impenetrable.

FWIW, the sentence you’ve selected scans even with no context (I haven’t [yet?] read the article).

Disclosure: I have professional experience in literary critical theory.

[rnewme]

Your comment means nothing to me. What does scans mean in this context?

[mistersquid]

“Scans” means the sentence is plausible. Not having read the article, I can’t say I agree or disagree.

I could expound on the grammatical structure and syntactical components of the sentence but I have to confess I’m too lazy to do so.

Basically, humanities have their own specific discourse communities and looking at an article that assumes prior knowledge can be usefully compared to starting with a paper on relativity theory without having understood Newtonian mechanics.

My apologies to any scientistic types I may have offended.

[rnewme]

Thank you for the explanation, TIL.

[sandspar]

Forgive me for saying so but much of humanities discourse seems like obscurantism.