Pretentious prose
Mar. 23rd, 2020 12:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
d_a_renoir.............................................................
Ugh.
(ETA: I've since found that this is an existing style of writing that I wasn't familiar with, so I'm just gonna bitch about the style itself rather than the text being the particular style of anyone in particular)
Dear Lord, do I despise people inserting some prosaic narration that seems to belong more in a waxing lyrical short story into what looks like a daily musing type blog post.
This is not what is actually written; this is just something I made up just to demonstrate the "vibe" of it:
I was looking at my son's test papers he brought home today. It's another one of those word-for-word memorization question-and-answer type. I wish more schools would have encouraged students to dig deep and analyze instead of just rote memorization. Instead of asking "Who signed the Declaration of Independence?", I would've liked to see something more along the lines of "What would you change to the Declaration of Independence and why?" It would have encouraged the students to deeply analyze the contents and context of the Declaration, perhaps even the state of mind of its writers, instead of simply memorizing dull facts.
With a wistful sigh, I carefully replaced the sheet of paper in the binder my son dutifully kept every single one of his test papers in. My fingers smoothed over the large "90" imprinted on the top right corner of the paper in gleaming red ink."You're sending your son to be trained into a photocopier", it seemed to say, accusingly. I placed the binder back on my son's desk, exactly where I had found it. All is not lost, though. There was a parent-teacher meeting coming soon, you see. I shall bring my indignance to bear in front of all the teachers then. For now, however, I will have the biggest smile and the most buoyant praise prepared for my son when he comes home later.
There. The first half is a normal musing/semi-rant about some life experience. And then it was ended with a cheesy narration straight out of YA novels or something. I'm noticing that infotainment type articles do this sometimes, but well... Maybe I'm just not looking at enough articles, but I've only seen it in interviews, or some sort of investigation report where the author is already narrating what's essentially a dramatic mystery story. Having a fluffy narration tacked on at the end seems fine then. Or perhaps bloggers with cutesy or snarky-themed entries that often opens the blog with a fluffy comment from the start. Then the fluffy closer sounds like it's part of the persona.
Imagine if I close out this entry with some vaguely philosophical babble, like "I turn to the window and saw that rain has fallen. I watch the water droplets drip, drip, drip to the ground. My earlier frustration slowly began to fade, little by little, as though washed away by Mother Nature's gentle tears."
It's like... wow, I know you know you have audience, and maybe you're playing to that audience, but it all sounds so affected I kind of want to punch something every time I read them. Maybe it's just me. When I polish up my writing I tend to sound more like a research paper. Like the contents are super dry and infodump-y, but also contains long-winded thesaurus words as though designed to pad up the page count.
I mean, I guess it's also just style, but it just feels jarring and obnoxious. Like a research paper suddenly has a section in the middle being written in l337$p34k without warning, and for no reason. If you like making poetic words so much, why don't you just write a legit poem or something?
Ugh.
(ETA: I've since found that this is an existing style of writing that I wasn't familiar with, so I'm just gonna bitch about the style itself rather than the text being the particular style of anyone in particular)
Dear Lord, do I despise people inserting some prosaic narration that seems to belong more in a waxing lyrical short story into what looks like a daily musing type blog post.
This is not what is actually written; this is just something I made up just to demonstrate the "vibe" of it:
I was looking at my son's test papers he brought home today. It's another one of those word-for-word memorization question-and-answer type. I wish more schools would have encouraged students to dig deep and analyze instead of just rote memorization. Instead of asking "Who signed the Declaration of Independence?", I would've liked to see something more along the lines of "What would you change to the Declaration of Independence and why?" It would have encouraged the students to deeply analyze the contents and context of the Declaration, perhaps even the state of mind of its writers, instead of simply memorizing dull facts.
With a wistful sigh, I carefully replaced the sheet of paper in the binder my son dutifully kept every single one of his test papers in. My fingers smoothed over the large "90" imprinted on the top right corner of the paper in gleaming red ink."You're sending your son to be trained into a photocopier", it seemed to say, accusingly. I placed the binder back on my son's desk, exactly where I had found it. All is not lost, though. There was a parent-teacher meeting coming soon, you see. I shall bring my indignance to bear in front of all the teachers then. For now, however, I will have the biggest smile and the most buoyant praise prepared for my son when he comes home later.
There. The first half is a normal musing/semi-rant about some life experience. And then it was ended with a cheesy narration straight out of YA novels or something. I'm noticing that infotainment type articles do this sometimes, but well... Maybe I'm just not looking at enough articles, but I've only seen it in interviews, or some sort of investigation report where the author is already narrating what's essentially a dramatic mystery story. Having a fluffy narration tacked on at the end seems fine then. Or perhaps bloggers with cutesy or snarky-themed entries that often opens the blog with a fluffy comment from the start. Then the fluffy closer sounds like it's part of the persona.
Imagine if I close out this entry with some vaguely philosophical babble, like "I turn to the window and saw that rain has fallen. I watch the water droplets drip, drip, drip to the ground. My earlier frustration slowly began to fade, little by little, as though washed away by Mother Nature's gentle tears."
It's like... wow, I know you know you have audience, and maybe you're playing to that audience, but it all sounds so affected I kind of want to punch something every time I read them. Maybe it's just me. When I polish up my writing I tend to sound more like a research paper. Like the contents are super dry and infodump-y, but also contains long-winded thesaurus words as though designed to pad up the page count.
I mean, I guess it's also just style, but it just feels jarring and obnoxious. Like a research paper suddenly has a section in the middle being written in l337$p34k without warning, and for no reason. If you like making poetic words so much, why don't you just write a legit poem or something?
