naive opinions on language

While this isn't an argument, I seek to just write: write about something and nothing, ramble about my inefficiencies and issues all while wasting the reader's time. If it isn't this kind of writing that I despise the most; writers that can turn a sentence into three and increase on word count and looks, appearing as non-pretentious and intellectual, when in truth they are, with their words only enforcing the truth. Yet it is through the perception of intelligence that makes this writing the most popular. This appeal to maximalism and choice to give every notion, every idea, every thought that the author conjures up an example, or two, or three, as if the reader had not understood it the first time to further their point is exactly what is wrong and what I hate. I should note that this type of writing is also the easiest, relying on cave men manual labor type writing rather than a well thought out cohesive, but comprehensive piece.  

"Another reason people dismiss new ideas is that it's an easy way to seem sophisticated. When a new idea first emerges, it usually seems pretty feeble. It's a mere hatchling. Received wisdom is a full-grown eagle by comparison. So it's easy to launch a devastating attack on a new idea, and anyone who does will seem clever to those who don't understand this asymmetry." - Paul Graham - Crazy New Ideas

Paul Graham, though I have nothing against him or his character, has a writing style that exemplifies my hate. Graham's paragraph is summarized at the start of his paragraph, saying that people often dismiss new ideas to appear sophisticated. But he chooses to use long winding, and overly complicated metaphors to describe this revelation. The circuitous route ultimately only serves at the detriment of the reader, complicating his original thought and prolonging the reader from finishing your piece. Ironically, as critiquing others that dismiss new ideas due to sophistication, his writing and verbiage comes across as an attempt to sound sophisticated rather than simply communicating the idea—kind of intellectual posturing. It should also be noted that the use of this language is also rather inappropriate for his audience of engineers, creating several layers of digression that they have to churn through.

Another symptom of maximalism is embellishment of punctuation, not including commas. With the establishment and increasing use of the em-dash, along with the semicolon, parenthesis, exclamation point, question mark, and colon, I feel that writers nowadays have been using these more than ever. As more writers lack in personality and creativity due to the internet and isolation, they naturally gravitate to increasing the use of punctuation, envisioning an increase of the fluidity and diversity in sentence structure and thought, when the sentence truly lacks emotion, love, and care. 

"He tries to think: had Lydia seemed strange the night before? He had been away four whole days, by himself for the first time in his life, visiting Harvard — Harvard! — where he would be headed in the fall. In those last days of class before reading period—“Two weeks to cram and party before exams,” his host student, Andy, had explained — the campus had had a restless, almost festive air. All weekend he’d wandered awestruck, trying to take it all in: the fluted pillars of the enormous library, the red brick of the buildings against the bright green of the lawns, the sweet chalk smell that lingered in each lecture hall" - Celeste Ng - Everything I Never Told You(2014)

Celeste Ng, a writer who was forced upon me by my school district in the form of required reading, has writing that proves this exact feeling. This paragraph does not do justice the lack of creativity and monotony of her book, but offers a glimpse of the repetition of punctuation that has encompassed our world. In just a couple lines, Ng uses a question mark, an exclamation mark, two em dashes, and a colon. Her style attempts to mimic a stream-of-consciousness thought process, showing the reader what the character was thinking and the subtle emotions faced, but the writing quickly becomes overwrought. It become excessive to a point where she tells rather than shows, distracting the reader from the central plot and resulting in cluttered sentence structure that compromises clarity and readability. 

While I think some punctuation use is good, and leads to healthy variation, the more egregious and unvaried use of punctuation is what really ruins a piece. Good writing will come from a mix of the two, yet the extreme of punctuation should never be an option. 

These paragraphs speaks to a larger issue: one that regards elegance over clarity.

We, as modern readers, often critique the past while simultaneously romanticize and masturbate at the writings of our predecessors. Jane Austen. Dickens. Woolf. Dostoyevsky. Writers of the past stay devoid of criticism, marked for their elegant and innovative prose who were alive centuries ago and heralded and honored in a similar manner. Despite the english language being optimizing and shortening over the past centuries, opting for a more concise, and straightforward writing, flowery and old prose has always been the most attractive, and it now seems to have no bounds. For instance, no one idolizes journalists—a profession that specializes in minimalism—the way modern readers idolize Russian authors. 

This reverence for the past and denunciation and rebelling of new, writers today come to a horrible middle ground where they lack the expertise to have meaningful, flowery language or insightful, subtle description, leading to a tipping of the scale on more is better. 

Writers today, caught between the allure of over-explanation and the reverence for outdated prose, struggle to find balance, ultimately losing sight of what writing is about: a method of communication which thrives off precision and honesty in thought, without excess.