C, as an adherent of the clear prose faction, I would have thought you it would evident by this point that what counts is clear prose is contextual and relative to an audience. Clarity to fourth graders is not the same as clarity to specialist scholars in a technical discipline. Your example would seem to fall towards the latter end of that spectrum, it's not my discipline. so I can't judge from the snippet, but it does look like ugly, graceless academese.
--- Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> Prose Sample. I would like to know from some of the
> adherents of "clear
> prose" how clear or unclear the following sample is?
>
> ********
> These remarks should indicate at least the existence
> and the difficulty
> of the question, a difficulty which puts its concise
> theoretical
> exposition beyond my powers. I must retreat
> therefore into a pragmatic
> discourse and try to illustrate the tension between
> grammar and rhetoric
> in a few specific textual examples. Let me begin by
> considering what is
> perhaps the most commonly known instance of an
> apparent symbiosis
> between a grammatical and a rhetorical structure,
> the so-called
> rhetorical question, in which the figure is conveyed
> directly by means
> of a syntactical device. I take the first example
> from the
> sub-literature of the mass media: asked by his wife
> whether he wants to
> have his bowling shoes laced over or laced under,
> Archie Bunker answers
> with a question: "What's the difference?" Being a
> reader of sublime
> simplicity, his wife replies by patiently explaining
> the difference
> between lacing over and lacing under, whatever this
> may be, but provokes
> only ire. "What's the difference" did not ask for
> difference but means
> instead "I don't give a damn what the difference
> is." The same
> grammatical pattern engenders two meanings that are
> mutually exclusive:
> the literal meaning asks for the concept
> (difference) whose existence is
> denied by the figurative meaning. As long as we are
> talking about
> bowling shoes, the consequences are relatively
> trivial; Archie Bunker,
> who is a great believer in the authority of origins
> (as long, of course,
> as they are the right origins) muddles along in a
> world where literal
> and figurative meanings get in each other's way,
> though not without
> discomforts. **********
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