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veqq  1mo ago (text post)   Edited 1mo ago   820 thread views

What's Good Writing to You?

Lately, I've proofread some friends' articles, native and not, on political and technical matters. In no case, did I only guide them to my preferred style (poetic diction, preferring verbs over nouns, participles over finite verbs, archaicizing, Germanic purist including V2, no hyphens) and rather enjoyed seeing, sampling (and rejecting) their distinct tastes. I once wanted to ask a friend who wields fiery invectives to liven up my (technical opinion) prose, but realized his style was ill-suited to sewing my bullet points together.

What is beautiful literature to you? Or clear and precise technical style? What do you just hate? Most importantly, what do you aim for and avoid when writing yourself?

I'm curious for opinions on all languages (even programming or e.g. programming code comment style) but naturally English is our community's shared tongue.

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Good writing is the mix of the expected and the unexpected to create impact on the reader.

Compare this comment I replied to a prior SSS post asking if Poetry has any use to communicate information over prose:

Rhyming (or other forms of meter like alliterative verse) has obvious benefits for memory, so in the sense that it sticks in my mind more quickly that kind of language is going to be more useful for getting across an idea in a sticky way.

I think we're going to get into a discussion here over what constitutes grasping or conveying meaning.

Consider the Clarihew

George the Third Ought never to have occurred. One can only wonder At so grotesque a blunder.

Would the sentence

George III was a pretty bad king.

get across the same meaning more quickly?

Probably yes, in the sense that you'll get what is being said in less time and can move on. But more people will remember the Clarihew, a week or two from now there's a good chance that a good percentage of them will be able to repeat it back to you even if they only read it once. I myself looked that poem up just now, after reading a reference to it in a children's book (I want to say one of the Indian in the Cupboard series) twenty-five years ago. So in that sense the couplet "George the Third, Ought never to have occurred" gets the reader to grasp the meaning and retain it much more quickly than the same message in prose. People will hear George III mentioned, connect it to "ought never to have occurred," and recall that he was a bad king. It would take reading much more prose to get a similar average retention rate.

This has long been the purpose of poetic meter, from marketing jingles to heuristics to nursery rhymes to epic poems.

{End of Prior Comment}

This applies equally to poetry and to prose, though to differing degrees in context. Psychedelic novels have more room to be unexpected, and greater expectations of unexpectancy, than technical manuals.

DFW is cited elsewhere in the thread, and I'm reading Infinite Jest right now and I'm struck by his talent. But also consider punchier writers like Hemingway, or Robert E. Howard.

Ordinarily one runs into text and it just slides right off. I'm realizing in real time this may be specific to me, I'm a confirmed wordcel at work and play. I scan two newspapers essentially every day, I work with text, and it's the unexpected sentences that stick with me, sometimes for years. The Clarihew stuck with me for decades, despite reading it merely referenced in another novel. I read DFW's String Theory years and years ago, but when having a conversation about athletes these paragraphs came back to me instantly and I looked it up to send to a friend (FWIW I disagree with a lot of the first paragraph):

But it's better for us not to know the kinds of sacrifices the professional-grade athlete has made to get so very good at one particular thing. Oh, we'll invoke lush clichés about the lonely heroism of Olympic athletes, the pain and analgesia of football, the early rising and hours of practice and restricted diets, the preflight celibacy, et cetera. But the actual facts of the sacrifices repel us when we see them: basketball geniuses who cannot read, sprinters who dope themselves, defensive tackles who shoot up with bovine hormones until they collapse or explode. We prefer not to consider closely the shockingly vapid and primitive comments uttered by athletes in postcontest interviews or to consider what impoverishments in one's mental life would allow people actually to think the way great athletes seem to think. Note the way "up close and personal" profiles of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of a rounded human life–outside interests and activities, values beyond the sport. We ignore what's obvious, that most of this straining is farce. It's farce because the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one area of excellence. An ascetic focus [37]. A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to live in a world that, like a child's world, is very small.

The idea that there can be wholly distinct levels to competitive tennis–levels so distinct that what's being played is in essence a whole different game–might seem to you weird and hyperbolic. I have played probably just enough tennis to understand that it's true. I have played against men who were on a whole different, higher plateau than I, and I have understood on the deepest and most humbling level the impossibility of beating them, of "solving their game." Knowle is technically entitled to be called a professional, but he is playing a fundamentally different grade of tennis from Michael Joyce's, one constrained by limitations Joyce does not have. I feel like I could get on a tennis court with Julian Knowle. He would beat me, perhaps handily, but I don't feel like it would be absurd for me to occupy the same seventy-eight-by-twenty-seventy-foot rectangle as he. The idea of me playing Joyce–or even hitting around with him, which was one of the ideas I was entertaining on the flight to Montreal–is now revealed to me to be in a certain way obscene, and I resolve not even to let Joyce [40] know that I used to play competitive tennis, and (I'd presumed) rather well. This makes me sad.

Famous first lines, like:

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

Or opening poetic stanzas:

‘My uncle, what a worthy man,
Falling ill like that, and dying;
It summons up respect, one can
Admire it, as if he were trying.
Let us all follow his example!
But, God, what tedium to sample
That sitting by the bed all day,
All night, barely a foot away!
And the hypocrisy, demeaning,
Of cosseting one who’s half alive;
Puffing the pillows, you contrive
To bring his medicine unsmiling,
Thinking with a mournful sigh,
“Why the devil can’t you die?”’

Or

Sing, Goddess, sing the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus—
that murderous anger which condemned Achaeans
to countless agonies and threw many warrior souls
deep into Hades, leaving their dead bodies
carrion food for dogs and birds—
all in fulfilment of the will of Zeus.

Start at the point where Agamemnon, son of Atreus,
that king of men, quarrelled with noble Achilles.
Which of the gods incited these two men to fight?

All combine the expected and the unexpected, juxtaposing what we think will come next with what the author inserts. All stick in my head.

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