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Comment by cbracketdash | Hacker News Reader

The author seems to use many qualifiers in each sentence.

So for example, rather than succintly stating: "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog", this author adopts the style more akin to: "The quick brown fox, which grew up Oakville near the rushing river, jumped, or, leaped mightily, over the lazy dog rather than simply walking around the dog like most would do normally".

Similar to Blaise Pascal's sentiment: 'I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.'

Indeed, Thomas Jefferson writes about this skill: “The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”

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If you're writing something for a bunch of nerdy engineers, discussing the mood/feelings/rationale about things is wasted effort. If you're writing for literature people, then all of the extra prose makes a difference and is nuanced. This board is made up of the former, and not the latter.

As a counter, readers of this board love some Tolkien, yet that writing goes on and on and on and on with so much extra text

> extra text

This describes the majority of all literature, works of the written word, and perhaps human communication in general. For Tolkien, it could be argued that the whole purpose of his books is to entertain with the medium of language, so all that "extra text" is not extra at all, since they're all supposed to be there to be appreciated and enjoyed. If you took away the "extra", there would be no literature there, just a plot summary.

Interesting proposal, you have my tentative approval. Perhaps concentrate on the poems.

But repeatedly using sentences which start with with words such as "but" or "and" can feel clumsy. And for some people it's hard to ignore these stylistic things.

It wasn't just extra prose. I found it genuinely difficult to read.

Writing in a way that engineers will dislike the inefficiency of and literature people (as if those are mutually exclusive groups) will dislike the style of hardly seems like the right compromise.

The difference between Tolkien and this article is that this author uses extra words while Tolkien introduces extra ideas. Such ideas are for enjoyment like you said. On the other hand, extra words just makes it hard to understand the author's intention. Tolkien presents his ideas so clearly that you almost never have to reread a sentence because of lack of comprehension.

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