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Animatstoday at 7:43 PM3 repliesview on HN

This guy hates Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, the famous "omit needless words" book. He's plugging for a baroque style that would be unreadable today.

We do have baroque styles today, but they're different from classical baroque literature. They're the postings that start with a bio and cover the author's hobbies before getting to the point, perhaps including an anecdote from the author's past. There are writers who can make that interesting, and you can read them in the New Yorker. But the serious magazines have editors. In blog postings, you're reading the slush pile.


Replies

jacobolustoday at 8:48 PM

Strunk and White promote all sorts of prescriptivist nonsense, taking arbitrary personal preferences and elevating them to sacred rules (including many which they themselves constantly violate because they don't accord with idiomatic English).

hecretotoday at 9:11 PM

There are a handful of these every day on the front page. It is very jarring when they suddenly shift topics completely, using some vaguely tangential connection between what they started with, and the vapid thing they want to write about. Honestly - it’s wankery.

Here’s one I just came across: https://asteriskmag.com/issues/15/rust-and-boll

And there are plenty of others.

orphereustoday at 9:12 PM

The modern response to baroque text is "mucho texto" jpeg with a gangster Yoda