EPT
I just come from the extreme "it's the writer's responsibility to be intelligible!" and you come from "it's the reader's responsibility to be intelligent!"So my baby picture is in the New York Times - Page 4
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babylon
8765 Posts
I just come from the extreme "it's the writer's responsibility to be intelligible!" and you come from "it's the reader's responsibility to be intelligent!" | ||
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
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QuanticHawk
United States32082 Posts
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SamsungStar
United States912 Posts
On January 28 2013 13:44 sam!zdat wrote: I think it's the writer's responsibility to infuriate and tantalize the reader into putting effort into understanding the text. the writer is something like a seductress playing hard-to-get Speculative fiction is entertainment, pure and simple. Any aspirational goals beyond that are merely icing on the cake. Some readers like to be infuriated and tantalized. Some readers don't. There's no one right answer to this argument here because writing can be anything under the sun, and to be honest I've seen pretty much every permutation manage to succeed on some level or another. Steven Erikson would probably be one of the best examples of a nearly incomprehensible, infuriating, and tantalizing fantasy writer, who tries to hit really big themes and meanings etc and uses obscure ways of writing. Is he as popular as A Game of Thrones? Hell no. But he does have his own fanbase. In general though, that type of writing is considered bad in F/SF. Why? Because for the vast majority of people, it is not entertaining to be confused and infuriated. | ||
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SamsungStar
United States912 Posts
On January 28 2013 13:40 babylon wrote: I think what we're "arguing" about is just how to allocate responsibility between the reader and writer. I just come from the extreme "it's the writer's responsibility to be intelligible!" and you come from "it's the reader's responsibility to be intelligent!"And yeah, it's pretty much this. The #1 reason I am resistant to the approach of "it's the reader's responsibility" is because it leads to lazy writing. It's also the #1 shitty excuse a new and crappy writer will use to explain why nobody likes his/her work. I can't tell you how many times I saw kids in college classes utterly convinced they were the next Shakespeare churn out some overwrought, overly elaborate crap to mask the fact they were really writing a simple story about adolescent angst. And when nobody liked it or even wanted to read past the 1st page, they were convinced nobody understood their genius and he was surrounded by a world of morons. It really doesn't lead to anything good when you start to take that approach to writing. Much better to master the fundamentals, learn how to entertain and capture an audience, THEN learn how to layer in more meaning and sophistication. There's a sequence to it. | ||
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SamsungStar
United States912 Posts
On January 28 2013 13:03 UniversalSnip wrote: That's beautiful, as well as very hard to misinterpret. It's about a general truth, samsungstar, not about you. This ancient chinese dude was not trying to provide insight about your specific situation. The ancient Chinese dude was never the subject in question. The intentions of that modern Chinese dude sam who decided to post a Zhuangzi quote very much was. So I'm really not sure what you're trying to get at here. I specifically said the reason I didn't like that quote in that context was because of it's genericness. You're now responding saying the quote is a general truth, and not about me, which in essence means you're paraphrasing me to tell me I'm wrong. | ||
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Grettin
42381 Posts
On January 28 2013 10:14 SamsungStar wrote: Haha yeah, I really like it. Next season's gonna be even better :D Thanks for teasing. Just watched the last episode of Taiwan.  | ||
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
On January 29 2013 02:29 SamsungStar wrote: Speculative fiction is entertainment, pure and simple. Maybe the kind YOU like On January 29 2013 02:37 SamsungStar wrote: that modern Chinese dude sam I'm not chinese, just well-read | ||
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SamsungStar
United States912 Posts
On January 29 2013 03:26 sam!zdat wrote: Maybe the kind YOU like I'm not chinese, just well-read You are a good person, Sam! And I'm not saying spec-fic is ONLY entertainment, but it is its first purpose. | ||
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UniversalSnip
9871 Posts
On January 29 2013 02:37 SamsungStar wrote: The ancient Chinese dude was never the subject in question. The intentions of that modern Chinese dude sam who decided to post a Zhuangzi quote very much was. So I'm really not sure what you're trying to get at here. I specifically said the reason I didn't like that quote in that context was because of it's genericness. You're now responding saying the quote is a general truth, and not about me, which in essence means you're paraphrasing me to tell me I'm wrong. essentially, yes, I am. It doesn't have to be about you and be specific to be a well told and genuinely revealing anecdote, and sam's intentions have to be presumed to be in accordance with the chinese dude's or he wouldn't have posted it. | ||
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
On January 29 2013 03:51 UniversalSnip wrote: sam's intentions have to be presumed to be in accordance with the chinese dude's now, now, let's not open up this can of hermeneutic worms | ||
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babylon
8765 Posts
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
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Carnivorous Sheep
Baa?21244 Posts
On January 29 2013 04:12 babylon wrote: I don't have anything against complicated writing done well, written with a specific purpose in mind, but it is just too often the case that authors try to blame the readers for not "getting" them. And sure, they certainly don't at a level, but at some point along the line, if most readers (even the targeted audience) can't "get" what an author is trying to say, then the fault lies with the author. They can't all be "bad readers," and it's far more likely that the author is simply failing to communicate the point. This makes a lot of assumptions that may not be true. Besides, if the author's intended audience (which surely exists as you yourself said earlier) truly is very narrow, it is very possible that from the author's POV, there really -are- that many "bad readers," defined here simply as readers who are not in the author's intended audience and don't understand the writing.\ And I think you're combining two issues here; a lazy author blaming the readers for not "getting" them is a separate issue from the merits of the work, and should be evaluated separately. On January 29 2013 03:47 SamsungStar wrote: Speculative fiction is entertainment, pure and simple. And I'm not saying spec-fic is ONLY entertainment Hm. | ||
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SamsungStar
United States912 Posts
On January 29 2013 05:11 Carnivorous Sheep wrote: This makes a lot of assumptions that may not be true. Besides, if the author's intended audience (which surely exists as you yourself said earlier) truly is very narrow, it is very possible that from the author's POV, there really -are- that many "bad readers," defined here simply as readers who are not in the author's intended audience and don't understand the writing.\ And I think you're combining two issues here; a lazy author blaming the readers for not "getting" them is a separate issue from the merits of the work, and should be evaluated separately. Hm. SC2 is a fun game, pure and simple. SC2 is also an esport. I don't see any reason why there is a conflict in making those two statements. SC2 could focus purely on game balance, but if the game isn't at all fun, who is going to play it? In essence, that's my point about spec-fic. | ||
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SamsungStar
United States912 Posts
On January 29 2013 03:51 UniversalSnip wrote: essentially, yes, I am. It doesn't have to be about you and be specific to be a well told and genuinely revealing anecdote, and sam's intentions have to be presumed to be in accordance with the chinese dude's or he wouldn't have posted it. /facepalm. I don't even know what you're complaining about. Sam didn't understand what I was referring to when I said MSM, so he posted something that didn't really relate. I told him I didn't think it related, we clarified, and life went on. Yet, for some reason, you're now trying to argue the merits of Zhuangzi's teachings, which were NEVER in question. | ||
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
edit: If that was always a lie to begin with and the work never was unified, then if you know that and still want to produce a work of your own, do you produce random fragments and discontinuous remains, or do you first imagine a unified thing and then deconstruct yourself? fredric jameson | ||
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SamsungStar
United States912 Posts
lol uh huh. totally related... | ||
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babylon
8765 Posts
On January 29 2013 05:11 Carnivorous Sheep wrote: This makes a lot of assumptions that may not be true. Besides, if the author's intended audience (which surely exists as you yourself said earlier) truly is very narrow, it is very possible that from the author's POV, there really -are- that many "bad readers," defined here simply as readers who are not in the author's intended audience and don't understand the writing.\ And I think you're combining two issues here; a lazy author blaming the readers for not "getting" them is a separate issue from the merits of the work, and should be evaluated separately. DISCLAIMER: Mostly about academic writing. Samsung, you can ignore this post, lol. It's fine if your targeted audience can understand you; that is not what I'm talking about. There is always going to be selection and self-selection, and you can't write for everyone, nor should you; you should write towards your audience. But what happens if the author's intended audience does not understand the writing? This is what I am primarily concerned with, and this is especially the case for many academics, who call each other out on torturous, convoluted writing and yet write the same way themselves, simply because, "It's fine for other people to spend so much time thinking about my writing, because I have Very Important Ideas, but please don't let me do the same with someone else's writing, because, dammit, it's a waste of my time." A very prominent scholar in my field published a book two years ago, and numerous professors and students in my department have just given up on it, because it's too dense. Sure, it makes brilliant points, but when everyone's churning out article after article, book after book, there's only so much you can read. You might as well set aside the unclear articles and focus on the ones that actually deliver their points well, the ones that don't insist on putting their main subject two lines away from their tiny, weak meaningless verb. If you believe that it's a reader's responsibility to be a "good reader," i.e. to "think" about your ideas, then at what point is it your responsibility to make sure the reader gets far enough along in the reading process to actually care to think about your ideas? Let me just be blunt here: when someone stops reading an article, because it takes too much effort to process the text (NOTE: I am not even talking about the ideas), it's because that person has decided the text has no value, and therefore, the content of that text has no value. That means they've just passed a snap judgment on the ideas in an article based purely on the text, which has become so great an obstacle to them that they just don't give a shit about your thoughts anymore. If that person is not in your intended audience, that's fine. Give them the finger and move on with your life. But if that person is in your intended audience, you have a problem. | ||
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
edit: oh and when I said that about "trying to say" before I forgot we were talking about nonfiction, that's different | ||
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