Greetings!
I’d like to talk about effective writing.
Or perhaps I should start from the standpoint of ineffective writing. For the purposes of this mini essay, I’m defining that as writing that gets in the way.
Let me illustrate what I mean with an example. A Substack post popped up in my inbox this morning that was embellished, so rich — not in a good way but like a cream cake that has way too much cream — that I read half of it just to see how bad it could get. And boy, did it get bad. Once sentence, for example, contained three different metaphors. And it wasn’t even that long a sentence.
As a result, I was so focused on the awful writing that I was unable to pay attention to the actual content. Mind you, I’m not even sure there was any content. I had the impression that the writer was so in love with the way he expresses things that he didn’t think it mattered if he had nothing to express.
Perhaps a good analogy is really bad acting. You become aware that the actor is acting. You know that they too know they’re acting (as opposed to being so immersed in the part that they are really living it, not just pretending to). At that point the game is up, the spell is broken. You can almost hear the actor saying to himself, “I will now look over the top of my glasses because that’s what a person in this situation would do.” And yes, they would. But there’s a difference between doing it because for a couple of hours you are that person and doing it because you’re just pretending to be that person. If you can’t fool yourself, you can’t expect to fool an audience1.
Here are three ways of making the same point, and I invite you to say which you prefer, and why. They are numbered for ease of reference, and are in no particular order.
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