If you're writing for yourself (and maybe a very small number of equally erudite readers) cut loose! Embrace "anfractuous density and heedless flamboyance." But if you're trying to change people's minds, or share knowledge widely, everything in this essay is defiantly at odds with what's necessary to get the rest of the world to pay attention.
Anyone who writes in a flamboyant style now - as the essay's author does - necessarily comes across as a kind of pastiche. There is something camp or affected about it. Maybe that can change. Maybe a new flamboyance can develop. But I think his antiquated style of flamboyance is unlikely to come back to real life.
Serve in a curiously beige vessel.
Necessarily? Not at all. I am not sure where “camp” or “affected” come into it. I am a nerdy English bloke and I suppose Americans, Canadians and Australians etc., will assume I am camp (which troubles me not one bit) so I may be unable to accurately judge, but I didn’t get either from this. It reminded me more of Fry or Lewis than Self, put it that way.
I think that in 2026, if you really want someone to read something, there should be some evidence that you wrote it. That means being brave and using your powers, whether they are misspelled, ungrammatical, or ornate.
There is guidance to strike a balance here, but there’s also encouragement to aim for beauty. Is his audience everyone, no, but it might be everyone who really wants to know.
Strunk and White can shove it, anyway, but then I am English. Plain language has enormous value in officialdom, insurance, law and finance, and it should be the goal, hence Crystal Mark etc.
But great writing is often audacious, and sometimes that means being ornate.
Like casting pearls before swine.
> True, some readers become indignant at their own inability to follow prose of any complexity or to recognize words any more obscure than those they are accustomed to using when talking to their dogs.
I do think that there is value in using precise, obscure words to convey precise, obscure knowledge (as with Hart's pogonotrophy example).
However, if all critique is dismissed as the indignation of swine, then how will anyone holding that position ever be able to tell whether they are just a bad writer?
Hart suggests that they should critique themselves, or rely on the critiques of those who write in the same way as they do. I am a programmer though, not an author. But I know that only accepting reviews from those I consider accomplished enough, and ignoring reviews by others as if they were indignant at their own inability to comprehend my code, is a very dangerous path to walk.
I suspect most are drowned out by indignant squealing.
Re: code. I want to address you twice.
1. "ignoring reviews by others as if they were indignant at their own inability to comprehend my code", yes because doing so means ignoring your manager (hah).
2. Code review is very difficult to get right, the question I ask myself is whether I trust the individual to approach the repo without prejudice to the method or the author, I would think the ignorant would be reluctant to post a review lest their ignorance be broadcast to the team.
And he gestures at the need for this at least once.
To be able to balance expressiveness and reticence, or to know when to cast that balance away, requires tact and ingenuity and taste on the part of writersThere's something ironic and self-defeating in trying to write to the whole world while also having such a low opinion of the whole world that a writer thinks they can't express themselves the way they want to or lose their audience.
As DBH says at the end of the essay, don't write down to what you presume to be the level of your readers, that's insulting to both you and your readers.
I've been at two memorial services in the past six months where Mary Oliver's poetry has brought consolation and closure to people who needed it. Her choice of words is deceptively simple. A public-school 10th grader can follow along.
Could she go deeper with a much richer vocabulary? Perhaps. Is she most effective -- and surprisingly subtle -- with the words she chooses? You bet. And what's true for Mary Oliver also is true for highly admired (and read!) historians, technical writers, etc. For me, at least, there's great power in simplicity.
Up until four years ago, your notion of "what's necessary" was the law of the land. Starting from sometime around Hemingway, we produced a century's worth of flattened, easy-reading slop, and much knowledge was shared very widely. There was a certain art to the blandness. (One notable master of that art is pg, the creator of this website.)
Then we fed that slop into a giant machine that makes it trivial for anyone and everyone to produce that sort of generic writing. If you want to change minds and differentiate yourself now, you can't just do the old flat style anymore. You have to set yourself apart somehow, and you can start by loving the craft of writing again.
The people who matter will read it and love it. Everybody else can take what you wrote, dump it into the slop machine, and rearrange it into something they find easier to read.
Clarity does not equate to genericity. I am regularly struck by clear writing that is both lucid and powerful without resorting to ten-dollar words or tortured syntax.
The fact that AI text is often so easily spotted is a clear sign that so-called 'slop' is not the same as a writing style focused on brevity and understanding over florid meanderings.
And then, while arguing against monotony, this piece spends all its time repeating the same structure: a ten-dollar adjective followed by a ten-dollar noun. Ironically, the five passages cited as “good writing” mostly avoid the wordiness that the piece spends all its time arguing for.
> Do not use a thesaurus.
Oh now he’s just taking the piss.
>And—well, here,
That was especially egregious. And! but—well, here, I guess, if I had to guess—which I don't(but I will)—the purpose of his essay seems to be, that; unintended ambiguity is good and really quite nice from an aesthetic standpoint. David Bently Hart seems to be the anti-McCarthy and falls into all the same traps as McCarthy, just walks into them backwards and blindfolded through a parentheses and a digression instead of jumping in head first.
I believe that this may be true of prose (it depends on the style of the author and the nature of what's being written,) but that it's untrue of every other form of written communication, and acclaimed prose stylists are often very poor letter-writers for just this reason. In writing non-prose, I find that there are only two rules:
1. Be as clear as possible.
2. Be as brief as possible, but do not veer into the intentionally laconic or abbreviated.
I also am absolutely certain that attempting to attain maximal elegance is a trap that leads directly to purple prose, to works of literature that cannot naturally be read out loud, and to other unfortunate outcomes.
We do have baroque styles today, but they're different from classical baroque literature. They're the postings that start with a bio and cover the author's hobbies before getting to the point, perhaps including an anecdote from the author's past. There are writers who can make that interesting, and you can read them in the New Yorker. But the serious magazines have editors. In blog postings, you're reading the slush pile.
I agree that many writers fill their works with needless diversions and unnecessary expositions on their life that add nothing to their text, but this is different from a "baroque style".
'We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.'
Apparently this struck a chord in mid-Atlantic anglophiles, forcing an era of bleating on about ol' Blighty.
TFA as well as many other works of blog, belong in that chest.
Presently I am reading Hilary Mantel, an exemplary prose writer of the highest merit, so I trust you'll forgive me my Jeevesian dismay at style of The Florid Article.
Here’s one I just came across: https://asteriskmag.com/issues/15/rust-and-boll
And there are plenty of others.
Orwell's maxim, "never use a long word when a short one will do", is something the best writers have always freely ignored. But it's a reliable guardrail for the writer of merely average skill, steering them toward something passable rather than vomit-inducing.
I loved it.
We're in an age where matrix multiplication can yawn out endless passages of trite, dull, sludge. The author, to my mind, makes a powerful and inspiring case for a future for human-written prose. The ability to effectively and creatively deploy a rich and complex vocabulary is the flex (in the parlance of our times) that distinguishes the craftsmen from the clankers.
Any reader is likely to come across passages that really speak to them at some point, but to raise that to “One really would have to have a miserly spirit not to love both” is just… sophomoric.
And if you think that “clankers” (such a silly, misapplied, childish term) somehow aren’t going to be capable of producing such prose, I have bad news for you.
> It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices. [1]
This passage is typical for the letters of educated people of that era.
Plowing through the endless waves of vacuous emails that reach my inbox daily, I cannot help but wonder whether we have lost something valuable in the arts of thinking and of expressing our thoughts.
[1] https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_8s12...
On the other hand, should an article about typography be posted, then there will be many comments regarding the nuances of serifs, kerning, spacing and ligatures. Ignoring of course that none of these change the facts/data being communicated!
Because of current slang, I read this as “peaced out” then realized it’s “pieced out”. Peace out
Hence I disagree with the "Never write for your audience" part of the essay.
Strunk & White, I have to agree, is mostly not very useful.
Anything else is just huffing your own farts for the kick of it. No matter how flowery the words are in your book or how intricate nuances of language. Such things can be outright counterproductive.
That’s the core tenet of any piece of journalism after all. To present information in an accessible way.
But a polemic that shit-talks the best authors of the 20th century is mid and unpersuasive.
> There are few if any passages in the works of Sir Thomas Browne that I do not find thoroughly delightful; but two afford me particularly intense pleasure.
> To my mind, each is in its own way a perfect, exquisitely faceted gem of English prose from an especially glorious literary epoch. The music of the one has haunted me for most of my life;
Oh come on. Sir Thomas Browne looks well worth reading but the author of this article is unreadably pretentious.
Nouns, verbs, prepositions, and articles. Use those.
Sir Baroquesly Yappington, Esq., an intellectual: writes a whole article about it
I agree with many things, in particular his sentiment about styles and "rules", but his demeanor is uninspiring.
He doesnt provide much clarity around good writing and just comes off as rationalizing his own taste.
You cant scorn popularity and accesibility, you gotta understand it and work with it to the extent that its important for what you want to achieve.
Art, history and social contexts fold in on themselves, if you're using a baroque style of writing then understand where it belongs and do something cool with it. Be conscious of it.
The title, combined with this, has provoked me into live-editing it.
I've turned on "anyone with the link can comment", and am using "suggest".
If you're interested, feel free to jump in:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GxprXLxbOlgaAQ2-IfYyk4zq...
There are lots of similarities between writing/editing prose and coding.
I think these become much more apparent when using version history / suggestion tools in word processors, especially collaboratively.
For editing long-form prose, especially fiction, word processing software is a long way behind git. This has always surprised me.