Your placing the burden on the audience is odd: "If we do not accept and respect them for what they are then we are creating barriers to harmonious and co-operative relationships". The same could be said of people who are inconsiderate of their audience.

hoopy frood wrote:Being verbose is fine. Some of the funniest wordsmiths to ever draw breath were characteristicaly verbose. Wodehouse and Douglas adams, for example.

hackenslash wrote:
Anybody who is writing for an audience and especially doing so with the audience in mind is already
doing it wrong . If you are not inconsiderate of your audience you are not writing they are

sennekuyl wrote:@Thommo: He uses more words than necessary to say what he does. Doesn't follow the 6 steps of Orwell (who is hard to read due to tedium. Farm house or whatever it is was boring as null despite its valid themes. 1984 a bit better.) so therefore ...

If it looks like a duck...

sennekuyl wrote:I don't think is universally true of his works, but it shouldn't be hard to find overtly complex or ostentatious wording. Orwell on the other had is slavishly adherent to his writing principles and less determined people do not slog through his minimalists works.

Text books imho often seem to comply with the Orwell principles, excluding the substitution of word size. Consequently they can be tedious in the same vein as loquaciousness appears/is to others .

tolman wrote:Or excessively using punctuation ... apparently with the intention of appearing ... like one is on a profound journey ... along a stream of consciousness ...

I'm not sure I'd call it inconsiderate unless they knew it was meaningfully annoying to someone they actually wanted to be their audience.
If they don't care whether I'm in their audience or not, it's not inconsiderate even if they know I find that kind of layout annoying enough to ignore unless there is content good enough to make it worth the effort.

hackenslash wrote:Frankly, that you have to cite somebody else's opinion (yes, that's what it was, regardless of the whose opinion it was) in support tells us that you don't actually have any support. All you have is opinion, and the opinion of somebody who has admitted that he can't be arsed with it if it doesn't fit his own personal paradigm.

Loren Michael wrote:

Destroyer wrote:

Loren Michael wrote:

Destroyer wrote:

It is one thing to criticize someone or something because they/it happen to fall short of a standard that is generally upheld as excellent. But it is quite another to criticize someone because they happen to like chicken and I beef. There are many varied styles regarding many different facets of human creativity. Within each style there is what could be considered a standard of excellence. Nevertheless all such styles are still subjective. There is none that can be objectively argued to be better than any other. So, whenever we observe a style that is completely different to our own we should never arrogantly assume superiority. We should just accept and respect the difference. We should only assume superiority if we are making judgements about our own style and feel that others - who share the same style - are not quite measuring up to the accepted standard of excellence (all subjective).

Criticize someone’s style, by all means. But only if it is one that you yourself share and you feel that someone's standard is below par. If we criticize a style of which we do not share ourselves, then we are bigots.

What I meant about the obvious support from those who espouse the content is in regards to the subject matter. Yes, there may indeed be some here who have expressed approval of pelfdaddy’s writing purely on account of the subject matter, irrespective of any concerns for the form and style of the writing. But that is only to be expected.

1) There's an analogy fail between criticizing someone's rhetorical style and criticizing someone for food taste preferences. The latter is personal, the former is public. In the context of communication, the former is also something that influences utility.

All writing style is personal style/creativity. The significance of my using “chicken” and “beef” in the analogy is meant purely to reference differences in human tastes/styles/opinions, not just culinary ones. Who expresses verbosity because it’s useful? I think that you will find that a love for verbosity by a skilled writer is primarily to show off their education and aesthetic manipulation of languages.

2) Why should anyone accept and respect differences? If someone is trying to communicate with me in a way I find boorish or uncomfortable, why am I obligated to accept and respect this? Why should I not criticize it for failing to take the other person in the conversation (me) into account?

Why should anyone accept and respect differences of opinions/tastes/styles? I would have thought that most eight to ten year old's have already begun to grasp this elementary lesson in human relationships: if one does not accept what is obviously occurring then one is deluding themselves. Others do have these differences; full stop. If we do not accept and respect them for what they are then we are creating barriers to harmonious and co-operative relationships. This is not about critiquing rhetoric and finding someone boorish and uncomfortable, this is about refusing to accept someone’s style for what it is. Verbosity will always be verbosity, regardless of whether it is expressed eloquently or boorishly.

No one is asking you to like the content, just the fact that some people love to adorn and embellish, it is who they are. If you do not share this style yourself, then fine, you are not required to be subjected to it against your will, just to respect the fact that others intend to persist with their own style irrespective of your dislike.

Analyse the content and rhetoric to your hearts content, there will always be those who are more skilled in rhetoric than others. pelfdaddy has not come here to claim that he is some master of rhetoric, just that he loves exaggerated language, that’s who he says he is. Others have shown their appreciation for what he has written. Those who do not appreciate it do not need to come here to tell pelfdaddy that there are better writers about than him. He has made no claims other than that he loves this style.

1) Again, you're failing at analogy. Preference for chicken or beef is personal. Communication is something that requires more than one person to work. One's choice of chicken or beef doesn't affect others, but how one elects to communicate does, whatever one's personal predilections for language.

2) Are you under some delusion that I don't recognize that people have these differences? One would have thought an eight to ten year old would recognize that by noting that someone's means of communication is exceptionally and ponderously wordy, that would imply that some difference has been recognized.

3) Some style is personal; other style is public. Once something is in the public sphere, people are free to comment on it. Once form affects function, people might comment on how effective that style is, how it affects the audience. "This is who I am" is, again, fine for expressing intimacy with what one has said. It's not a defense of poor communication. "Who one is" may simply be a poor communicator, and one may wish to affect that facet of who one is, if one is inclined to take the audience into account. "Who one is" may appear to others to be a poseur.

Your placing the burden on the audience is odd: "If we do not accept and respect them for what they are then we are creating barriers to harmonious and co-operative relationships". The same could be said of people who are inconsiderate of their audience.

Loren Michael wrote:A physicist using jargon to other physicists isn't doing anything wrong. A physicist using jargon to laypeople isn't being considerate.

Loren Michael wrote:
Nah, it just meant that I had happened to have read something about Orwell a few days before and it was fresh in my mind.

Orwell's advice apparently agreeing with me is by definition support, not to mention a few people in this thread who have chimed in with opinions roughly aligning with mine. But you're right, all I have is opinion! That's all I've claimed, too. I'm glad we're on the same page.

Destroyer wrote:Again, you are failing to grasp the distinction between standards and styles. All humans who write are in a position to criticize the written word. But the style in which one chooses to express those words should never be criticized, even if one loathes the means by which they are being communicated. One either distances oneself from it or endures it quietly, because it just happens to be the way of that individual.

tolman wrote:

Destroyer wrote:Again, you are failing to grasp the distinction between standards and styles. All humans who write are in a position to criticize the written word. But the style in which one chooses to express those words should never be criticized, even if one loathes the means by which they are being communicated. One either distances oneself from it or endures it quietly, because it just happens to be the way of that individual.

If, on a thread I am part of, someone is writing with strange formatting, or in txtspk whch is un4tun8ly r'd 2 read, then even if I think they are somehow incapable of doing otherwise, I don't see there's any overwhelming reason why I should keep quiet if I find their style so hard to read that it outweighs the perceived benefit of the content, at least if I have reason to think they might want me to consider what they wrote, such as there being some interaction between us.
Letting them know that there may be a reason other than their content or any feelings I might have about them as a person why I might effectively ignore them doesn't seem like an automatically bad thing to do, since even if they take offence at my saying that, they make take less offence than they would if they wrote something they think is relevant and I (and possibly various other people) acted as if it didn't exist.

If their style seemed to be an affectation they clearly could change with little effort if they wanted to, at least I'd feel less bad about ignoring them if I knew that they knew that they are choosing to do something which will possibly result in me ignoring their posts, since they would have made an informed decision that their style choice was more important than my interaction.

Having said that, I'd be very unlikely to comment on the style of someone who was talking sufficient nonsense for me to ignore the posts of based on content alone, or on threads where I wasn't actually playing a part.

Destroyer wrote:
If your audience/recipient does not share or appreciate your concepts or means of communication then they should inform you of this

Destroyer wrote:I have already made it clear that if one considers themselves to be the target audience and one finds that they do not like what is being communicated, then they should let the individual know. If, having been informed that their manner of communication is not to the liking of their target audience, that individual still persists because their manner is so much a part of who they are, then the target audience must decide whether to endure what they find distasteful, or distance themselves completely. We only need to remain quiet when we become aware that someone will always persist with their idiosyncrasies, because that is just who they are.

tolman wrote:

Destroyer wrote:I have already made it clear that if one considers themselves to be the target audience and one finds that they do not like what is being communicated, then they should let the individual know. If, having been informed that their manner of communication is not to the liking of their target audience, that individual still persists because their manner is so much a part of who they are, then the target audience must decide whether to endure what they find distasteful, or distance themselves completely. We only need to remain quiet when we become aware that someone will always persist with their idiosyncrasies, because that is just who they are.

So it's fine to say a style is irritating enough to render the content unreadable, since that isn't criticising the style?

Destroyer wrote:It's fine to say whatever one feels. If one wants to criticize someone's style that's up to them. But if I criticize someone just because they happen to express themselves differently that I do, or they like to be verbose or concise, or speak with an accent, or very loudly and passionately: then I am being intolerant of their natural difference.