Lefty despair

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Sun Sep 22 16:17:07 PDT 2002


Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:


>If any piece written by a leftist is unreadable, it can be
>corrected, through editing, proofreading, etc.

What left publications do you read? Most of them emerge barely readable or worse *after* editing.

Someone once sent me two versions of a piece written for The Progressive - one before and one after editing. The effect of the editing was to make the piece stylistically and politically duller (in both senses - boring and lack of sharpness).

Why is it important that stuff not be dull? For one, there's a great pleasure in reading good prose, and suspicion of pleasure is no dobut one of the reasons left pubs are so dull (along with fear of giving offense). But for two, there's also the issue of persuasion - it'd be nice to appeal to people beyond the One True Church. I know some people find this a pointless or silly goal, but I don't.

Doug



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