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Comment by ryanwaggoner | Hacker News Reader

Interesting idea...just for reference, I ran it on a recent blog post of mine: http://www.ryanwaggoner.com/2008/08/how-simple-is-too-simple... (sorry for the spam :-)

Overall, I would say that it was most useful when it was pointing out things like passive voice or cliches, and less useful when telling me to replace relatively simple words or phrases with even simpler ones. Some of the words were things like: "feedback", "solicit", "desire", etc. We could certainly replace these with "opinion", "ask for", and "want", but some of the meaning and nuance is lost, especially given the context.

I may not be the most eloquent writer, but I'm not writing for a group of 4th-graders. The "dumbing down" of language leads to dumbing down of thought in the long run.

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As with any piece, your style should reflect its purpose and the intended audience.

In the "real world" I quickly discovered that eloquence and "getting the message across" are inversely proportional.

The human brain prefers the dumbed down language. That's why people take trash novels to the beach and not Scientific American.

Look at any novel and notice that nearly all the dialogue uses the word "said". Amateurs always switch this out with words like "exclaimed" and "retorted".

Pros know that the goal is to simply seduce the reader into their narrative as quickly and quietly as possible.

Also, the use of "said" allows for subtlety of dialog that would be lost with more trite words such as "exclaimed" or "retorted".

Joyce takes it to an extreme: only a dash separates dialog from narration.

I think that's an Irish writing style and not particular to Joyce. I know I've seen Roddy Doyle books use it, at least. Could have been copying Joyce's style, mind you, but I doubt it.

Joyce invented the style. It has since been used by many other authors. Now that I think about it, it was a kind of refactoring or re-encoding: making a shorter symbol for a sequence that's frequently repeated.

What exactly do you mean by "The human brain prefers the dumbed down language."? Am I different from my brain? Because sometimes I enjoy books that aren't dumbed-down.

"But I don't want to be a pro writer of trash novels that are read and discarded on the beaches of the world," he retorted.

Given the choice, I'd much rather write the kinds of articles you see in Scientific American or the Economist. By writing for the masses, you must write for the lowest common denominator. No thanks.

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