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Comment by kierangill

My revolt is against the cognitive stress of reading generated text. A trope typically indicates I’m in for an uphill read.

I recently read this William Zinsser quote that inspired a nickname for this: Clotted Claude [1].

> Nobody has made the point better than George Orwell in his translation into modern bureaucratic fuzz of this famous verse from Ecclesiastes:

> > I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

> Orwell's version goes:

> > Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

> First notice how the two passages look. The first one at the top invites us to read it. The words are short and have air around them; they convey the rhythms of human speech. The second one is clotted with long words. It tells us instantly that a ponderous mind is at work. We don't want to go anywhere with a mind that expresses itself in such suffocating language. We don't even start to read.

[1] https://blog.kierangill.xyz/clotted-claude

parent kierangill 1 month ago

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