article of interest

[rc-am]

what, again?  is this an ongoing saga in the US or lot of places?   has
someone studied the phenomenon of the 'bad v good writing' disputes?  is
there something in the philosophic history of the US -- perhaps an
antipathy to certain kinds of philosophy which becomes vectored through the
apparently technical criterion of good grammar and legibility?   good
writing isn't reducible to good grammar, surely; and different contexts
impose their own grammatical styles as well as 'licenses'.  and, i would
challenge anyone to argue convincingly that readability isn't connected to
(or is often the same thing as) familiarity with a philosophical, national,
historical, 'subcultural'...  idiom.

seth wrote:


> Orwell was right in "Politics and the English Language." If an idea
> *can* be expressed simply and clearly, but is instead expressed opaquely
and
> with unnecessary jargon, then there is probably an ulterior motive at
work:
> either the author is trying to euphemize an indefensible idea or he is
> trying to make his thoughts appear to be the product of some specialized
> realm of knowledge that is unattainable to the mere mortal.

forgive me, but this sounds a little paranoid to me, or perhaps not
paranoid enough.  couldn't it as likely be the case that writers who use
phrases and concepts without querying their self-evidence are likewise
peddling something?

first, i don't think it's possible to say that on the one side stand the
self-evident, consensual, transparent and neutral concepts of everyday life
and on the other side there are those nasty opaque philosophical or
political concepts.  politics and philosophy share a task, though not
always rendered in the same way: they have to involve pulling apart such
self-evidence, the apparent neutrality of language and idiom.  it doesn't
always work, but it is a task that shouldn't be abandoned because it
doesn't work some of the time.  it shouldn't seek to reimpose, as i think
the 'bad v good' contest obviously does, certain rules or philosophical
premises under the guise of asserting a technical or neutral requirement.
that, to me, is a far more insidious motivation, not least because it seeks
to deny the importance of what should remain one of the central tasks of
both a radical politics and philosophy.

secondly, anyone who automatically responds to something they find
illegible with the assertion that the writer is trying to pull a trick on
them or to make the author seem like a god is, well, infantilising.  there
are many reasons why communication isn't possible or easy (even and
especially in a language such as english which both presumes
standardisation and has a multitude of idioms), and not all of them need to
invoke Mount Olympus in order to be explained.

Angela
_________