mandarine

In the wake of Dorothy’s recent post about The Polysyllabic Spree in which she describes how Nick Hornby unfairly judges fiction writers who tirelessly seek the holy graal of perfect conciseness, how she finds that the laborious rehydration of parsimonious sentences often requires too much work from the reader, and how she feels some sense of comfort in lengthy description-rich Dickens novels, I wanted to add my voice to the chorus and share that, although I place great value in short to-the-point writing, especially for my technical line of business where 24-point presentation chart headings have to be mercilessly pruned to convey complex concepts in just one line, I have also had this opposite tendency, ever since my early essay-writing attempts at school, to veer towards verbose and ramified prose which the teacher would invariably slash into smaller chunks with big red dots, and to confess that in a nutshell, in spite of all the admiration I have for concise writing, reading Proust has made me discover how much I enjoy the lulling luxuriance, serpentine sleekness, and waltzing warmth of really long sentences.

Read on

Reading Proust as if he was a blogger

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