One could also propose making it not full of rants, but I don’t think that would be an improvement. The rants are important. The rants contain data. They reveal Eliezer’s cognitive state and his assessment of the state of play. Not ranting would leave important bits out and give a meaningfully misleading impression.
This reminds me of something that was said in one of my favorite blog posts of all time, Nobody. Understands. Punctuation. The main idea in the post is that punctuation communicates tone, and there usually isn’t a right or wrong way to go about that. In particular, the author talks about how run-on sentences can be the right tool for the job, and I think that’s related to the point about how Eliezer ranting was also the right tool for the job.
Punctuation started with periods that told the speaker when to take a breath, and as both a longtime proponent of using the run-on sentence to better communicate the ranting rage in my head over the nonsense that people choose to fight about in this country and a person who is occasionally asked to read his work out loud, I’ve come to value this original function in a visceral way.
This reminds me of something that was said in one of my favorite blog posts of all time, Nobody. Understands. Punctuation. The main idea in the post is that punctuation communicates tone, and there usually isn’t a right or wrong way to go about that. In particular, the author talks about how run-on sentences can be the right tool for the job, and I think that’s related to the point about how Eliezer ranting was also the right tool for the job.