joanna bujes wrote:
>
> Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> >
> While it is true that the simple, clear stuff comes last, not first...
> while it is true that everyone needs to throw a couple of books away
> before they come up with a good one (for example, Balzac,
> Shakespeare)...while it is true that one needs to get a certain amount
> of garbage/verbiage out of the way before seeing one's way clearly, it
> does not follow that for Orwell to write clearly there needs to be a lot
> of obfuscation around.
I suppose in an ideal world all scholars are great scholars, great writers, great thinkers. But in a less ideal world, if we want to know X in order to write about Y, and it turns out that most of the scholarship which describes X is poorly written & much of it wrongheaded or egotistical or whatever, then if we are able to use that to write clearly and beautifully about Y, then it is the case that our study of Y would not have been possible without all the badly written, egotistical writing on X.
And I have known personally some fine teachers and excellent conversationalists who were lousy writers, but who would not have been around to do that fine teaching if they had not plunged ahead and published their badly written material. I have also learned over the last 50 years an awful lot from sources that were badly written, plagued with errors, petentious, et cetera.
Anyone who decides that they will only learn from well written and clear sources is going to end up an ignoramus at the end of his/her life. That may have been why Orwell's writing, as a whole, was so damn shallow -- he was unwilling to learn from others who were, he thought, his inferiors.
Carrol