Having read the article, I disagree. What "style" of writing? The sentences aren't excessive, the language is all fairly common (the author even takes pleasure in simplifying "scramasax", clearly inviting us to take pleasure in it as well). What's wrong with it?
It's not meant to be a list of purely literal facts. It's entertaining and a pleasure to read.
As for Paul Graham's opinion piece; well, that's just silly. Something written is inherently different to something spoken; they have different strengths, different attributes, different purposes and, should they have the same goal, can best achieve that goal in different ways. Why choose to discard the strengths of the written?
The first paragraph of the quoted piece is a nightmare. The first sentence of the second and third paragraph are poorly drafted as well. In the rest, the verbose recounting fits the theme and does not distract from the point.
As a writing exercise, let me re-write the piece:
"What happened during the Middle Ages is unclear and the evidence we use to understand it is contradictory. Reviews depict the period as one filled with conflict and struggle, but artistic works dated to this period - from the calm, serene looking statues to the expansive, aspirational Gothic architecture - instead hint that they were created by happy people in a flourishing society.
Perhaps the lack of recorded history in this period is the result of peace and a lack of notable incidents rather than war, famine and disease."
The idea is interesting but bite-sized when stripped of the pomp.
The first paragraph of the quoted piece is a nightmare.
Mmm... use of the word "nightmare" to criticise something that's discussing the dark ages, where the critique is about just that kind of skill level, but then you go on to present a junior grade summary. Deep troll or accidental writing ability? Too close to call.
But that illuminates a fundmental part of the problem here. To many on both sides of the page, much writing is also a game, to be played by the reader and the author. It's meant to be fun, but if one doesn't realise it's a game to be played and that the game is itself another layer of meaning, one will simply end up getting annoyed, wondering why the author didn't just present a plain list of unadorned facts.
By all means, don't play the game if you don't want to, or critique the game as one plays - point out literary shots that didn't get over the line, or cross-language allusions that are playing a bit fast and loose with etymology.
But to see the game being played and tell people to stop playing it? That's not right.
You're replying after the quoted paragraph was snipped from the thread, so I'm not sure if you actually read my post with the full context.
The original paragraph was: "Paradoxical in its manifestations, disconcerting in its signs, the Middle Ages proposes to the sagacity of its admirers the resolution of a singular misconception. How to reconcile the unreconcilable? How to adjust the testimony of the historical facts to that of medieval art works?"
This paragraph is obfuscated at best, unintelligible at worst. This is a fairly common writing style in continental philosophy, and in that field the debate isn't whether or not the writing is bad. It's whether or not the writing is intentionally bad.
Fossuser’s criticism was not directed at the article at all. It was directed at the Fulcanelli quote given by ohaideredevs.
The Dwellings if Philosophers (as translated) starts out with “Paradoxical in its manifestations, disconcerting in its signs, the Middle Ages proposes to the sagacity of its admirers the resolution of a singular misconception.” This says so little with such absurd wording that it’s almost word soup.
Which words seem absurd and word soup to you? "Paradoxical"? "Sagacity"? "Manifestation"? "Resolution" Perhaps because Spanish is my first language, none of those seem purple prose or difficult to me. They are very straightforward, with the possible exception of "paradoxical": most people who don't read books don't know what it means. For example "sagaz" (someone who displays sagacity) is a very common word to us; Samwise Gamgee from Lord of the Rings is called Samsagaz in the Spanish translation.
Now if you're going to argue all Latin-based and Romance languages are less straightforward than English, that's a riskier (and dismissive!) proposition.
I'd say "Sagacity" is definitely a very rare word in English, certainly less common than "paradoxical". It is often the case in English that a Romance loan is considerably more high-brow than its Germanic synonym ("wisdom" in this case).
The problem is not merely with the words chosen but they way they're stitched together. Someone else tried to rewrite it without the over-the-top flowery language and it's far more concise despite still not being particularly minimalist.
The rewrite, while simpler and arguably clearer, also seems more boring to me. It doesn't engage my imagination.
In any case, the original doesn't set off my "bullshit detectors". Such an aggressive way of commenting on a piece of writing! Not everyone must or should write like Hemingway -- not even Hemingway!
That's fair and maybe it is more boring. It was, after all, an off-the-cuff rewrite by some random person on HN. It wasn't written to demonstrate the ideal way to present the argument, but as a way of showing that the original used a whole lot of words to say not that much.
If you read carefully, the rewrite leaves out a lot of the content. For example, the original text claims that "all the Gothic buildings without exception reflect a serenity and expansiveness and a nobility without equal". That claim simply isn't reproduced in the rewrite. Nor, to take another example, is that claim that certain monuments were built "in the enthusiasm of a powerful inspiration of ideal and faith".
The rewrite leaves out a lot of words. The bits you've quoted don't actually say much, which is rather the point. If you take the quoted bits literally, the first is absurd (all Gothic buildings, really?) and both are begging the question because they already assume the premise is correct. There's precisely nothing that demonstrates that Gothic buildings are reflecting the serenity of society, nor that monuments are accurately portraying an idealistic or faithful society. It's a whole lot of not content.
It's quite silly to suggest that a book could be made more "concise" by omitting what appear to be some of its central theses. (This is an extract from the first few paragraphs). It's also silly to expect the introduction of a book to provide detailed arguments in favor of those theses. If you want to evaluate the argumentative rigor of the book then you'll have to read the book, which presumably goes into more detail in subsequent pages.
You really don't seem able to take a book on its own terms. This book wasn't written to give you personally exactly what you want from a book. Just because you want to read pages of dense logical argumentation in flat prose doesn't mean that you can fault every author who writes a different kind of book.
The only phrase which really is "too French" here is "proposes to the sagacity of its admirers". (It's not wrong, but not many English speakers still use "propose" in its sense of "set before someone as a goal".) Other than that, I see a well-balanced sentence in which every word has a purpose – but "well-balanced" versus "straight-forward" is a matter of taste.
Every time I read that sentence I can't help but picture some huckster standing on a soap box at an intersection in an impoverished neighborhood in the 30s. It's so clearly crafted to impress rather than inform that I can't help but feel a sales pitch is coming.
Well, yeah, which just goes to show that you're interpreting a work written by a French alchemist in 1929 in an American cultural context where everything is some kind of sales pitch - which is why you're getting the wrong end of the stick.
I agree that's the most cumbersome phrase. But I think the difficulty people are perceiving here is more in the grammar being difficult to parse rather than in the vocabulary being florid.
I think the issue is that the author doesn't establish a clear thesis from the very beginning. Additionally, the bizarre nature of the thesis and long run-on sentences only serve to confuse the reader as to what it is exactly that he is trying prove or disprove.
It's not meant to be a list of purely literal facts. It's entertaining and a pleasure to read.
As for Paul Graham's opinion piece; well, that's just silly. Something written is inherently different to something spoken; they have different strengths, different attributes, different purposes and, should they have the same goal, can best achieve that goal in different ways. Why choose to discard the strengths of the written?