Interesting and appreciated! Especially since I may have both of those going on with my own writing...
The latter critique sounds like “practice makes permanent” advice combined with particular taste about the quality of one’s typical audience and your discourse intentions, which makes sense to me. LW seems to appreciate a sort of moralistic criticism, for example, and unless I consciously recalibrate, I’ve noticed that creeping into text where that’s not helpful. I think I’m going to have to think about this one...
The former critique, curiously, is something I’ve tried to do on purpose out of active preference since I was in about the 4th grade. My speech sometimes acquires elements of the formality of text, and I try to bring the bounce and emotion of speech to my text where appropriate. I like text like that. And speech like that. Was there a reason this habit was supposed to be bad, or was it just a “reflexive prescriptivism”?
I tried googling and found that “writing for the sound of it” occurs in three places on the internet: this very thread, here, and here. My impression from context is that it has something to do with issues of status, tone-matching, and accidentally pushing people’s buttons or falling on the wrong side of someone’s textual shibboleth detector by accident? If you strip the personality out, I’d expect text to escape undue scrutiny, which seems helpful in some contexts, but if the personality survives or is exaggerated I’d expect strong reactions both ways, which seems helpful in other contexts. I went through a Tom Robbins phase in high school out of love for his ridiculous prose and vivid descriptions, but I know there are people who hate his stories for exactly the same elements.
Interesting and appreciated! Especially since I may have both of those going on with my own writing...
The latter critique sounds like “practice makes permanent” advice combined with particular taste about the quality of one’s typical audience and your discourse intentions, which makes sense to me. LW seems to appreciate a sort of moralistic criticism, for example, and unless I consciously recalibrate, I’ve noticed that creeping into text where that’s not helpful. I think I’m going to have to think about this one...
The former critique, curiously, is something I’ve tried to do on purpose out of active preference since I was in about the 4th grade. My speech sometimes acquires elements of the formality of text, and I try to bring the bounce and emotion of speech to my text where appropriate. I like text like that. And speech like that. Was there a reason this habit was supposed to be bad, or was it just a “reflexive prescriptivism”?
I tried googling and found that “writing for the sound of it” occurs in three places on the internet: this very thread, here, and here. My impression from context is that it has something to do with issues of status, tone-matching, and accidentally pushing people’s buttons or falling on the wrong side of someone’s textual shibboleth detector by accident? If you strip the personality out, I’d expect text to escape undue scrutiny, which seems helpful in some contexts, but if the personality survives or is exaggerated I’d expect strong reactions both ways, which seems helpful in other contexts. I went through a Tom Robbins phase in high school out of love for his ridiculous prose and vivid descriptions, but I know there are people who hate his stories for exactly the same elements.