> I didn’t seek this out.
Oh, come on.
> Ultimately it is compliance - someone called it aggressive compliance, I can't really comment on that.
Hmm, I suppose either the house style mandates what I would consider extremely poor writing (I won’t belabour the reasons), or the house style mandates some broadly formal style and the challenge is to write well within it. If the former, I suppose you should take my comments as applying to the house style and not your own writing ability; if the latter, I’d more or less reiterate what I said, and I doubt any non-insane style guide would, say, forbid you to use plain Anglo-Saxon words, vary your sentence length, write grammatically, etc.
In either case I admit I find it very bewildering to reconcile your well written comment with the solecisms and illiteracies that post was littered with*, or to make sense of your coming here to read and grow upset at criticism of a post which – given your now-evident possession of a brain stem – you must surely have known was atrociously written.
Thanks for your civil response, and for your taking my comment in the same spirit. It wasn't meant as a personal attack, no. It was meant to be an impersonal attack: all I knew of you was that piece of writing, and that was all I wanted to consider. Hopefully** my comment contributes to better instructing whoever and/or whatever was or were responsible for that lobotomised dross!
* With which that post… **Yeah, yeah, ok
I spend more time than I’d like adding in positive language around everything because people overreact to anything not super positive. So to avoid people misinterpreting my comments, Ill usually add in lots of “a+,” blue ribbon, superpowers, etc blargh.
I appreciate you writing your article and participating in this thread but think we’re part of the problem.
If people are better able to accept criticism, then we’ll get more reality. Until then, I’m more likely to comment positively or not comment at all on the very likely chance that the author jumps into a thread and spazzes out on me.
I think you were trying to empathize, but I don’t think a master’s in English is necessarily useful for the topics brought up in this thread. Without more context (school, projects, interests, performance) I don’t think there’s any correlation between masters in English and ability to read and write well.
[0] Not in a Dr Jekyll scenario, not even if in some Parfit-esque farce their brain were indexterously bisected with cheese wire and not either half but the intervenient dribble of corpus callosum attained sentience would said brain-dribble even in its admitted abjection be left with the deficit in neuronal voltage absolutely required to bring that tripe into existence, no more than I could fake a Pollock, or Infinite Jest, or Finnegans Wake.
If you want constructive advice: try to write in the same way that you would talk. Shallowly, that means read your writing out loud – what Flaubert called his 'gueulade' – or, even better, vice versa: write down your spoken thoughts. More deeply it means not saying anything that you wouldn't say in real life. Get to the point, ditch the fluff, treat it like a (garrulous, one-sided) phone call. Have your point constantly at the front of your mind, and only say what's absolutely necessary to explain or justify it. It will improve your writing immensely.
Oh, and read Orwell's 'Politics and the English Language': https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_poli.... If pressed for time, then particularly the last third or so. His advice is the best you can ever hear as a writer. Reflect on your good fortune: by writing this, you've now identified what makes good writing.