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This seems like a perfect example of someone who needs to read pg’s essay “write like you talk”: http://paulgraham.com/talk.html I don’t get an intelligence vibe from this style of writing - it mostly just sets off my bullshit alarms.
That is, if I can improve my writing significantly...
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Writing style is a matter of taste. The blunt "as spoken" style is just as much an affect as some of its more flowery alternatives.
I'm assuming you're using "an affect" in the sense of "an affectation" or "affected" here, in which case, no. Plainness, simplicity, straightforwardness are words that would describe "as spoken" writing. They are also literally antonyms of "affect" in this context, which would mean pretentiousness, artificiality, pomposity.
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I’d argue it’s good advice for people that value clarity over sounding smart. I’d guess there were people that valued this in most times and cultures.
The quoted text isn't at all unclear (especially taking into consideration the fact that it's a translation).
You may have a preference for purple prose, but it's silly to pretend that the quoted text is clear.
I'm suspicious when people write like that because it can be used to hide bad reasoning behind unnecessarily complex word choice and sentence structure. If you care about sharing ideas it's better to write simply.
> The true “dark age,” of course, was the early 1940s when, simply as a side effect of industrial killing, great swathes of the past disappeared. One small yet major example—the extraordinary series of paintings of the visions of Hildegard of Bingen, made in the 1170s either by the saint herself or under her supervision, disappeared in the general catastrophe that unfolded in Dresden in early 1945. We only know what…
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> many prominent European writers have called it "barbaric" and "only good for business" Snobs in general tend to look down on people who don’t place value on pomposity for its own sake.
>Snobs in general tend to look down on people who … That in itself is snobbery. It's just fashion bouncing back and forth between hating on the poor and hating on the rich. One is fashionable until everyone does it then the opposite is in vogue. Are the cool kids today wearing factory-ripped jeans these days or are they hating on people who do? It is just stupid to say "this style is the only acceptable style and any…
It isn't stupid. It's snobbery. If you denigrate straightforward writing as "barbaric", you're a snob, plain and simple.
> Surface quality is boring, substance is important.
My problem with overly-flowery writing is specifically that it's about style and not substance. If your goal is to educate or to entertain, put that first. If your goal is to impress the reader with your loquacious conveyance of verbiage, fine, but you're sacrificing substance for style. And I personally think this sort of writing shows a disrespect toward the reader, because it's literally about the author showing off and trying to impress the reader.
You know how sometimes you'll go to a website and it hijacks your scrollbar to show some unnecessary visualization or a gratuitous rotating 3D view of a product? And you look at it and you can appreciate the artistry that went into creating the visualization, the skill that went into rendering everything perfectly and syncing it with the scrollbar. But mostly it's fucking obnoxious because you just want to scroll down to read the article or click the "buy" link and instead you're wasting your time fighting with the site that broke your scrollbar because some product manager was sure you'd be impressed. This is the website version of dense, flowery, self-important prose.
> The true “dark age,” of course, was the early 1940s when, simply as a side effect of industrial killing, great swathes of the past disappeared. One small yet major example—the extraordinary series of paintings of the visions of Hildegard of Bingen, made in the 1170s either by the saint herself or under her supervision, disappeared in the general catastrophe that unfolded in Dresden in early 1945. We only know what…
It is even more specific. Eastern Roman Empire remained functional until it fell to the Ottomans in 1453 AD.
But in Britain there were not even coins between the years 410 and 600 AD:
http://www.numsoc.net/darkages.html
"History has proved time and time again that when money is in short supply – the people turn to a token or obsidional coinage, no matter how base, rather than do without money as a medium of exchange completely. This has been demonstrated by siege coinages, lead tokens, brass farthings and merchants’ tokens over the millennia."
But there was nothing for these two hundred years. Not even foreign coins, and not any kind of substitute.
That's why these years are considered completely dark there. And that's why it looks like a real collapse there. So whenever we speak about some dark ages we have to be aware also about which land area we talk about.
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The quoted text isn't at all unclear (especially taking into consideration the fact that it's a translation).
The quoted text is verbose and tedious. It uses a lot of complex words to convey little information, both of these things negatively affect clarity. You may have a preference for purple prose, but it's silly to pretend that the quoted text is clear. I'm suspicious when people write like that because it can be used to hide bad reasoning behind unnecessarily complex word choice and sentence structure. If you care about…
> If you care about sharing ideas it's better to write simply.
That's good advice if you're writing blog posts in 2019 with the goal of driving traffic to your site. And why should any writer aspire to a higher goal than that?
I would love to see a reasonable explanation for the rapid development of Western Europe. The henge circles all across the world (including the new world) show an advanced mathematics and astronomy for thousands of years before the rise of settler empires say parity ~9000 BC. Jump forward all the way to the late 1800s and despite the glacial pace of social change in Russia they are still designing one of the best rif…
Rapid and development in what sense? This topic is sort of contaminated by the fact that most askers of the question have a circular definition that refuses to countenance the concept that Western Europe might have been far from dominant (e.g., in areas such as quality of life or health).
In terms of how Western Europe came to politically dominate the world, this essentially boils down to them deciding to arm their trading fleets and have them act as a military force against competitors, and then snowballing the resulting profits into more powerful navies (and armies) that the other countries couldn't keep up with. The technological gap often wasn't near as wide as people usually assume it to be, and there are several instances of Western powers getting their asses kicked by natives, but the Western powers could afford to keep up the pressure for decades or even centuries if need be, whereas the native peoples had less ability to recover from attrition. At the same time, European powers were also able to achieve highly centralized states that prevented them from collapsing due to internal struggles mid-snowball, which is generally the historical case for large empires (see: Aztec, China, Inca, Rome).
The thing that stands out for me about this period is the lack of a "descent from antiquity". [1] There is no well-established genealogical descent in Western Europe from antiquity to the modern era. Familial lines of descent can be traced to the very late Roman period, and from the early medieval period to the modern era. But there is a chasm that can't be crossed because the societal norms that allowed families to…
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That’s not societal breakdown, that just means the inbred aristocracy doesn’t go back to antiquity. Society and its rulers are not the same thing.
Still, there were families in those days with unfathomable wealth. If memory serves me well, one was so wealthy that when they sold their land after becoming Christians they caused a real estate crisis across the Roman Empire. (Source: The inheritance of Rome, Chris Wickham, one of the early chapters.) And just a few centuries earlier, Julius Caesar arguably was one of the richest to have ever lived on earth. It's se…