No, we should ask them to think through their ideas, and if they are worth sharing, to present them clearly and as concisely as possible.
A lot of Modernism is under the delusion that inpissated prose equals profundity. Richard Feynman, talking about quantum theory ,said that 'if you can't present your ideas clearly, you don't understand them'.
There are difficult concepts out there - for example, the problem of consciousness, and to write clearly about them takes a lot of hard work. But clarity and transparency really should be the aim of good writers. That is what will make them good writers .
I don't think it's about profundity. As to what a good writer is, dunno. I like inpissated, same as inspissated spose.
No, we should ask them to think through their ideas, and if they are worth sharing, to present them clearly and as concisely as possible.
A lot of Modernism is under the delusion that inpissated prose equals profundity. Richard Feynman, talking about quantum theory ,said that 'if you can't present your ideas clearly, you don't understand them'.
There are difficult concepts out there - for example, the problem of consciousness, and to write clearly about them takes a lot of hard work. But clarity and transparency really should be the aim of good writers. That is what will make them good writers .
Nice riposte, Q, 'taking the inpissated' deserves to be in the dictionary! Wittgenstein gives some prime examples of taking a sentence with, what is on the face of it, a clear meaning and showing the complexity of the taken-for-granted concept and meanings of words in it. Exhausting stuff!
I prefer the clarity of Popper, even if he is considered the lesser philosopher. But is this because he is more easily understood?
Our church group has been reading Rowan Williams' 'Being Human'. This is a book that has many good ideas, but is hard work because Williams hasn't (in my opinion) worked hard enough on his prose.
My fellow groupees think it's their fault they don't understand him. Not so!
Sorry for this tangent - I should get out more but they won't let me.
Nice riposte, Q, 'taking the inpissated' deserves to be in the dictionary! Wittgenstein gives some prime examples of taking a sentence with, what is on the face of it, a clear meaning and showing the complexity of the taken-for-granted concept and meanings of words in it. Exhausting stuff!
I prefer the clarity of Popper, even if he is considered the lesser philosopher. But is this because he is more easily understood?
Our church group has been reading Rowan Williams' 'Being Human'. This is a book that has many good ideas, but is hard work because Williams hasn't (in my opinion) worked hard enough on his prose.
My fellow groupees think it's their fault they don't understand him. Not so!
Sorry for this tangent - I should get out more but they won't let me.
It depends what kind of writing we're talking about. I used to teach report writing, and the aim is to be clear and concise. But I am OK with difficult novels such as Ulysses. Also, some novels have a smooth surface, but complex undertones, Jane Austen is a good example. Boy meets girl, but under the surface, depths of psychological complexity.
Our church group has been reading Rowan Williams' 'Being Human'. This is a book that has many good ideas, but is hard work because Williams hasn't (in my opinion) worked hard enough on his prose.
Williams' style is in part deliberate: he believes in being as clear as possible but as difficult as necessary. I agree that he may not always succeed in the first part.
It depends what kind of writing we're talking about. I used to teach report writing, and the aim is to be clear and concise. But I am OK with difficult novels such as Ulysses.
Sentence by sentence the prose in Ulysses is admirably clear and concise (at least in those sections that aren't deliberately pastiching bad prose). That's not the way Ulysses is difficult. The difficulty lies in the transitions between sentences.
No, we should ask them to think through their ideas, and if they are worth sharing, to present them clearly and as concisely as possible.
A lot of Modernism is under the delusion that inpissated prose equals profundity. Richard Feynman, talking about quantum theory ,said that 'if you can't present your ideas clearly, you don't understand them'.
I'm going to take issue with Feynman's idea as applied to anything outside of quantum theory (which I know little about). I've been told, during teacher training, that if you can't pronounce a word, that means you don't understand it, which is similar-level bullshit. Understanding something correctly and expressing it so that others can understand it correctly are two different skills. I know plenty of people who demonstrate a high understanding of theology, plumbing, or human interaction through their actions and nevertheless can't articulate it worth a clam. And some of them have crappy self-esteem levels because they've bought into the idea that the ability to communicate clearly is All.That.Matters. Not so--that's what interviewer/writers are for.
Richard Feynman, talking about quantum theory ,said that 'if you can't present your ideas clearly, you don't understand them'.
But then while apparently Feynman probably didn't actually say, if you think you understand quantum mechanics then you don't, as far as I can tell he would have agreed with the sentiment.
I suppose you could say that "perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely he mutely craved to adore"., is clear and concise.
The reason those are the sentences people always cite is that they're atypical. Bloom is having a moment's brain fart brought on partly by hunger and mostly by repressing the subject his thoughts have been skirting round all morning. (What that subject is is unclear if you don't read the notes or a plot synopsis, because Bloom's thoughts have been skirting all around it.)
I'm going to take issue with Feynman's idea as applied to anything outside of quantum theory (which I know little about). I've been told, during teacher training, that if you can't pronounce a word, that means you don't understand it, which is similar-level bullshit. Understanding something correctly and expressing it so that others can understand it correctly are two different skills. I know plenty of people who demonstrate a high understanding of theology, plumbing, or human interaction through their actions and nevertheless can't articulate it worth a clam. And some of them have crappy self-esteem levels because they've bought into the idea that the ability to communicate clearly is All.That.Matters. Not so--that's what interviewer/writers are for.
Hear, hear.
And I'm going to take issue with the idea that there are no writers who are not trying to be clear. There are certainly writers who are the literary equivalents of the Dadaist movement.
Although not Dadaist in name, I will say that Ulysses was not written with the idea of being clear first and foremost in Joyce's mind. Finding the story thread (I don't say plot) involves wading through yards of obfuscatory dreck.
I have some doubts, actually, about the intentions of anybody who deliberately obfuscates. It strikes me as masturbatory. If anybody else gets pleasure out of it, it's by accident.
Back in my A Level and degree days I remember being told that the essay writing convention was to assume that the reader (ie examiner) had no knowledge but would understand anything you told them as long as you were clear and unambiguous. This is entirely artificial, ignoring as it does that understanding is often dependent on prior knowledge. On the other hand, we assume prior knowledge all the time, such as that *rydyn ni'n siarad yr un iaith.
I think that this is the sense in which Feynman should be understood.
By way of a f'rinstance, I can tell you that DNS is the means by which a fully qualified domain name (FQDN) is converted to a numerical IPv4 or v6 address. I can further add that some client implementations are able to use default or configured domain suffixes to attempt resolution of a simple host or NetBIOS name.
That would I think pass Feynman's test, but doesn't mean it would necessarily convey anything to a given reader
Finding the story thread (I don't say plot) involves wading through yards of obfuscatory dreck.
Reading Ulysses for the story thread is like watching a Marx Brothers film for the bits with Zeppo. If you don't find Groucho, Chico, and Harpo funny that's just life, but it's not like they're there to get in the way of the good bits.
Finding the story thread (I don't say plot) involves wading through yards of obfuscatory dreck.
Reading Ulysses for the story thread is like watching a Marx Brothers film for the bits with Zeppo. If you don't find Groucho, Chico, and Harpo funny that's just life, but it's not like they're there to get in the way of the good bits.
Hmm - at least Zeppo is in there. Reading Ulysses for the story thread is more like trying to find the Lost Paradise of Mordor.
I don't think that's true. Modernism did not view clarity or transparency as a lofty ideal. There are many difficult writers and artists and film makers, should we ask them for a Ladybird version?
Meanwhile, back in the world of commerce, there is a frequent TV ad for a mattress which describes it as 'the most awarded mattress of the year'. I presume they mean award-winning. But maybe there are places where mattresses are routinely handed out as prizes. Not much more difficult to envisage than the competition of mattresses - which I take it consist multiple events in all the uses to which mattresses are put.
Meanwhile, back in the world of commerce, there is a frequent TV ad for a mattress which describes it as 'the most awarded mattress of the year'. I presume they mean award-winning.
No, they mean mattresses are handed out as prizes. It's a perfectly normal thing these days. It's why I won't enter competitions. After a short while, your bed starts to look like the one in the Princess and the Pea, and they never award you a ladder to get into it.
But obscurity is part of a modern style. The flawed hero is the epitome of current style in writing for all media, and writing in a way where you only slowly realise the flaws and the implications is very much the way it is currently done. And it makes for an interesting-if sometimes difficult-read. Related is the unreliable narrator. Some of us really enjoy that mess that makes of your assumptions (one of my favourite tv series this last year was Legion - with a fundamentally unrelaible narator taken to extremes. And as it went on, you came to realise jsut how unreliable he was).
Marquis de Sade - if you want a writer who is actually published but so piss-poor he would never have made it past the intern in a sane world. As compared to Joyce, who is, I think, a good writer who writes drivel that is not worth the effort.
I just cannot bear the word 'kids' used instead of 'children'. Find it demeaning. Just a personal idiosyncrasy, I suppose, because I have no problem with 'guys' (used for both sexes).
You're not alone. I've hated "kids" for as long as I can remember. Children. Not kids and certainly not the airy-fairy "little ones". Ugh.
I'm going to take issue with Feynman's idea as applied to anything outside of quantum theory (which I know little about). I've been told, during teacher training, that if you can't pronounce a word, that means you don't understand it, which is similar-level bullshit. Understanding something correctly and expressing it so that others can understand it correctly are two different skills.
True.
But what Feynman was talking about is a thing I see often - people who think they understand something, and then start to try and explain it to someone else and realize that the explanation they're trying to give doesn't actually make logical sense. That's different from being a bad communicator.
It's easy to follow an explanation of something as you read it, and think "yes, that makes sense", but not to actually internalize the understanding.
I think we're on the same page. Just wanted to point up that the circle of those who understand a thing thoroughly AND the circle of those who are able to clearly articulate that thing are not, in fact, one and the same circles. There's a substantial overlap, but it's not total.
I am constantly infuriated by references in the English media to 'Mount Snowdon'. The mountain's name is Snowdon in English, Yr Wyddfa in Welsh. The massifas a whole in nowadays referred to as 'Snowdonia' (English) or, more correctly, 'Eryri' (Welsh. People don't talk about 'Mount Ben Nevis' or 'Mount Scafell Pike', so why the need for the unnecessary qualifying noun?
I hadn't noticed that, but am used to the word Mount prefixing a volcano, as in Mount Fuji, Mount Etna, Mount St Helens and so on. It does not belong on Snowdon.
Some mountains here are Mount Thus-and-such, while some are Thus-and-such Mountain. Thus I have climbed Mt. Deception, but also Bandera Mountain. The peaks are less than 3 km distant, so it's not a regional thing!
It's odd because British mountains are never Mt. anything. A few in Wales have English names ending in mountain, and in Welsh there are Mynydd Epynt, Mynydd Du etc. but never Mt. Somethingorother.
It's odd because British mountains are never Mt. anything. A few in Wales have English names ending in mountain, and in Welsh there are Mynydd Epynt, Mynydd Du etc. but never Mt. Somethingorother.
Scotland does have Mount Keen and Mount Blair, but in those names the word is just an Anglicization of the Gaelic equivalent of 'Mynydd'.
The excuse is always that it's referred to as 'Mount Snowdon' to distinguish the peak from the general area of Snowdonia (a coinage in itself). Another bugbear is 'Lake Windermere", used to distinguish the lake from the town.
The excuse is always that it's referred to as 'Mount Snowdon' to distinguish the peak from the general area of Snowdonia (a coinage in itself). Another bugbear is 'Lake Windermere", used to distinguish the lake from the town.
There is a Mt Snowdon in British Columbia, apparently, but Snowdon in Gwynedd is just Snowdon. Or Yr Wyddfa, ideally. It doesn't have snow on it for most of the year anyway. It'd have to be twice as high to reach the permanent snow line.
Snowdon is still Snowdon, even when it hasnt been snowed on. I don't think I often hear it called Mount Snowdon - but I might be lucky.
There is the fabulous quiz question - how many lakes are there in the Lake District? the answer its 1 (Bassenthwaite I think). All the rest are Meres - like Windermere. Or Waters - like Wastwater.
And that goes double for "bleeding edge," which a former Leader™ of an old company was forever pairing with the term "cutting edge." Where's the vomiting smiley?
Here's one that had me spluttering into my morning cup of tea: The UK NHS is apparently back 'in the eye of the storm'. This phrase is used without any appreciation that the 'eye of a storm' is actually the quiet calm centre.
Yes, we know what the NHS guys mean, but it is irksome. Mrs RR says I'm being pedantic, adding, 'no one likes a smartarse!'
I bet they are referring to Kent as the epicentre, which irritates geologist me no end. Epicentre used to mean the spot above an earthquake, hence the "epi". It is now used instead of "centre", presumably because it sounds more important, or scientific, or something.
Here's one that had me spluttering into my morning cup of tea: The UK NHS is apparently back 'in the eye of the storm'. This phrase is used without any appreciation that the 'eye of a storm' is actually the quiet calm centre.
Yes, we know what the NHS guys mean, but it is irksome. Mrs RR says I'm being pedantic, adding, 'no one likes a smartarse!'
Comments
I don't think it's about profundity. As to what a good writer is, dunno. I like inpissated, same as inspissated spose.
I prefer the clarity of Popper, even if he is considered the lesser philosopher. But is this because he is more easily understood?
Our church group has been reading Rowan Williams' 'Being Human'. This is a book that has many good ideas, but is hard work because Williams hasn't (in my opinion) worked hard enough on his prose.
My fellow groupees think it's their fault they don't understand him. Not so!
Sorry for this tangent - I should get out more but they won't let me.
It depends what kind of writing we're talking about. I used to teach report writing, and the aim is to be clear and concise. But I am OK with difficult novels such as Ulysses. Also, some novels have a smooth surface, but complex undertones, Jane Austen is a good example. Boy meets girl, but under the surface, depths of psychological complexity.
Sentence by sentence the prose in Ulysses is admirably clear and concise (at least in those sections that aren't deliberately pastiching bad prose). That's not the way Ulysses is difficult. The difficulty lies in the transitions between sentences.
Blimey! Never seen that in any of the stuff submitted to me for editing!
Them's are $5 words.
I'm going to take issue with Feynman's idea as applied to anything outside of quantum theory (which I know little about). I've been told, during teacher training, that if you can't pronounce a word, that means you don't understand it, which is similar-level bullshit. Understanding something correctly and expressing it so that others can understand it correctly are two different skills. I know plenty of people who demonstrate a high understanding of theology, plumbing, or human interaction through their actions and nevertheless can't articulate it worth a clam. And some of them have crappy self-esteem levels because they've bought into the idea that the ability to communicate clearly is All.That.Matters. Not so--that's what interviewer/writers are for.
Hear, hear.
And I'm going to take issue with the idea that there are no writers who are not trying to be clear. There are certainly writers who are the literary equivalents of the Dadaist movement.
Although not Dadaist in name, I will say that Ulysses was not written with the idea of being clear first and foremost in Joyce's mind. Finding the story thread (I don't say plot) involves wading through yards of obfuscatory dreck.
I think that this is the sense in which Feynman should be understood.
By way of a f'rinstance, I can tell you that DNS is the means by which a fully qualified domain name (FQDN) is converted to a numerical IPv4 or v6 address. I can further add that some client implementations are able to use default or configured domain suffixes to attempt resolution of a simple host or NetBIOS name.
That would I think pass Feynman's test, but doesn't mean it would necessarily convey anything to a given reader
*we are speaking the same language.
had something to do with Cthulhu.
Only if he originally came from Penrhyndeudraeth.
Hmm - at least Zeppo is in there. Reading Ulysses for the story thread is more like trying to find the Lost Paradise of Mordor.
Weren't you one of the party attacking Ulysses?
No, they mean mattresses are handed out as prizes. It's a perfectly normal thing these days. It's why I won't enter competitions. After a short while, your bed starts to look like the one in the Princess and the Pea, and they never award you a ladder to get into it.
Marquis de Sade - if you want a writer who is actually published but so piss-poor he would never have made it past the intern in a sane world. As compared to Joyce, who is, I think, a good writer who writes drivel that is not worth the effort.
You're not alone. I've hated "kids" for as long as I can remember. Children. Not kids and certainly not the airy-fairy "little ones". Ugh.
True.
But what Feynman was talking about is a thing I see often - people who think they understand something, and then start to try and explain it to someone else and realize that the explanation they're trying to give doesn't actually make logical sense. That's different from being a bad communicator.
It's easy to follow an explanation of something as you read it, and think "yes, that makes sense", but not to actually internalize the understanding.
Scotland does have Mount Keen and Mount Blair, but in those names the word is just an Anglicization of the Gaelic equivalent of 'Mynydd'.
"Orodruin" means "Mount Red-orange".
There is a Mt Snowdon in British Columbia, apparently, but Snowdon in Gwynedd is just Snowdon. Or Yr Wyddfa, ideally. It doesn't have snow on it for most of the year anyway. It'd have to be twice as high to reach the permanent snow line.
There is the fabulous quiz question - how many lakes are there in the Lake District? the answer its 1 (Bassenthwaite I think). All the rest are Meres - like Windermere. Or Waters - like Wastwater.
Loch rather than lake is a translation issue, I would say. Not a naming issue.
Yes, we know what the NHS guys mean, but it is irksome. Mrs RR says I'm being pedantic, adding, 'no one likes a smartarse!'
It’s nice that you and Mrs. RR can both be right.