"Good Authors who are nonetheless bleeps" Topic

I am currently reading 'the great Arab Conquests' by a chap named Hugh Kennedy.

It's good, concise and gives an excellent overview of the main period of the conquests for a beginner like me.

But he suffers from a syndrome of not being willing to use a common word or phrase when an obscure one will do – he uses 'Ovicaprids' for 'sheep and Goats, which at least has the excuse of saving three letters, but then uses 'Herders of Ovicaprids' where you and I would use 'Shepherds'. He then later EXPLAINS what 'Ovicaprids' means. If he thinks his reader wasn't going to understand what the word meant, there is only one possible reason he used it. He is a .

One, that actually left me aghast was 'Dethesaurisation'.

I am an educated man. I have a degree. I read a lot. But using 'Dethesaurisation' instead of 'putting gold and silver back into circulation' is just wrong. It saves space and time, but using a word that 99% of your readers will have to look up in a (very good) Dictionary is stupid. It's like putting water in your gastank because it's cheaper than petrol – the car shudders to a stop.

So now, as I read on, at the back of my mind, I am constantly wondering what ridiculous piece of usage he is going to come out with next. what a .

Who is your favourite example of an Author who is good, but has a weakness that makes you snarl?

Pat

Unfortunately I'm doing a History and Classics degree and such words are used fairly often. We all had a good laugh when someone in the tutorial thought dethesaurisation meant putting it into plain english (thesaurus = treasure house of words) before trying to find the word in our dictionaries and failing.

I caught myself using the term boviform iconography the other week and just felt uncomfortable.

I find it a bit pompus when an author will quote someone in their native tounge and not provide a translation for those of us who don't speak that particular language.

Hmm, I think someone ought to write an obfuscation machine for the web. You type in a simple to understand text, and it converts it all to 17 letter words.

For the love of all that's holy, stop it with the unintentional irony before it gets out of hand!

Allen

I have returned 20-30 page papers ungraded, with the single comment "You and I can understand this, but re-write this (by Friday) in layman's terms, since the audience specified in the instructions is laymen".

Having to de-obfuscate your own 25 page paper in 2 days cures one of the habit quickly.

I thought this was about authors who are #%$&%$% in real life, not just in prose. I know a few of those, too.

Speaking for myself, I floccinaucinihilipilificate the otiose employment of sequipedalian cirumlocutions.

All the best,

John.

As a writer and author, I would not classify anyone who wrote in the manner you describe as "good." But I would classify him as an obnoxious, tedious . So you got that part right.

I have come across two books in recent years, that were about good subjects, but the authors could not help themselves using totally obscure words. One was a Professor writing a book about the Italian allies of Germany in WW2. A good subject totally ruined by his attempts to show off to his university friends who probably play 'obscure scrabble' with him. He seemed to totally forget that the book was for general publication and therefore not to be read by his friends, but by the wider public. It was literary rubbish because it was near unreadable.

The other was a book written by a journalist who obviously wore out several thesaurus while finding obscure ways to describe the ordinary. I presume he was looking for a prize in literature. The reviews of his work all seemed to include "tedious"…"Pompous"…"Laborious" etc. I presume it sold poorly as a result.

Because of the way he went about it the author would often spend two or even two and a half pages, describing what most good authors would have dealt with in a paragraph. How it ever got published at all amazes me.

"Thinking themselfs wise they became fools".
Russ Dunaway

Sounds like he was never actually forced to take a composition class.

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.

The length of this document defends it well against the risk of its being read.

- Winston Churchill

I have a book that is supposed to be foundational in my area of interest, and the author is supposed to be one of the best writers out there. It reads something like this:

In the process of the slow, but continually advancing, evolution from the torpedo boat, whether first class or second, to torpedo boat destroyer, acknowledging that not every nation took exactly the same path, not to mention that not every nation indigenously developed torpedo boats, given that many nations relied on export producers such as Vickers and Thornycroft for the embellishment of their rosters, some branches of the development tree, such as torpedo gunboats and the euphemistically named torpedo cruisers, were orphaned, later passing into obscurity as their utility decreased with the ever widening gap in capabilities, particularly speed, that exemplified the difference between the post-torpedo boat former, and the later, resulting their somewhat ingominious use in secondary roles such as training ships and boy's barracks, that belied their original, if misconceived, intent.

Faddle.

Virtualscratchbuilder – subject sounds interesting. What book is that from??

Someone channeling Bulwer-Lytton, from the looks of it. That's all one sentence. A real sentence is still hiding in there, too:

In the process of the slow, but continually advancing, evolution from the torpedo boat, whether first class or second, to torpedo boat destroyer, acknowledging that not every nation took exactly the same path, not to mention that not every nation indigenously developed torpedo boats, given that many nations relied on export producers such as Vickers and Thornycroft for the embellishment of their rosters, some branches of the development tree, such as torpedo gunboats and the euphemistically named torpedo cruisers, were orphaned, later passing into obscurity as their utility decreased with the ever widening gap in capabilities, particularly speed, that exemplified the difference between the post-torpedo boat former, and the later, resulting their somewhat ingominious use in secondary roles such as training ships and boy's barracks, that belied their original, if misconceived, intent.

I'm generally a proponent of writing like you speak, but if a lecturer pulled this one on me I'd report him to his boss for language abuse.

A real sentence is still hiding in there, too:

Yup. But it is unreadable when you have to go hunt for it.

(not bad for a made-up example, eh?)

Not Bulwer-Lytton though.

Bulwer-Lytton:
link
and
link

"Thinking themselfs wise they became fools".
Russ Dunaway

Presumably quoting Romans 1:22, yes?

Re: Virtualscratchbuilder's excerpt:

Take out all the commas, and that's just a sentence from the DBA rulebook.

My wife is going through an MBA program right now. She's had perfectly good, easily understandable papers returned to her because they weren't long enough. I also pursued Master's in history until I had a sudden attack of common sense. These guys don't live in the ordinary world. Most historians that I encountered would not say in three words what could easily be said in 12.

I think of History as "Tell Me a Story Time," so I do sometimes keep talking instead of just putting out bullet points.

On the other hand, I do history because the stories are so cool, and I want to share them.

Cpt Arexu
Historical Archaeologist
(Archaeology is just History with Stuff! Or maybe History is Archaeology without Artifacts)

I recall reading a book about the Byzantine Empire back in the day, some fellow's thesis. Not so much arcane vocabulary as just plain boring. He spent more time debunking professor so-and-so's view than advancing his story. Often the footnotes took more space than his text. I plowed on through the book because his research was good but it took months to finish the book. Two paragraphs were usually enough to put me to sleep.

That sounds like a book I read in college in the very late 1960s about the naval war between the Ottomans and the Mediterranean Christian states. I used it to help me get to sleep. Even though the period was (and still is) interesting, the author was as dry as dust!

I also abhor authors who don't provide a translation into English (since English readers are the audience) of a quotation that is in another language. When I mentioned that in a book critique for a college level historiography class, my professor replied that it was implied that the audience would be familiar with that other language as well as English. I think now, as I did then, that such an argument was specious.

Jim

I've always run across that stuff from people who are trying to sound 'academic'.
I had dinner with a history professor and one of his young grad students and I could see her still struggling to adopt his pretentious style of speech… stopping herself to replace street-level words with more 'exalted' ones. We weren't even discussing history.
If the words were more precise that would be one thing, but most of the time they aren't… they're just there to identify the author as a member of the proper club.
It often smacks of insecurity trying to remold itself into arrogance.

Vtsaogames:

That's a thesis for you! A thesis must be boring to be approved by the examiners, you know… My own is so boring and pedantic that I won't dare to publish it ever (except as a cure for insomnia, of course!) Now I am trying to figure it out how to downsize its 689 pages to just 240 and its illegible text to real Spanish, and not that gibberish that I wrote.

Yep, that's a thesis for you! Debunking other theories – check. Long footnotes – check. A thesis has a completely different audience from a published book. The real fault here is the editor who published someones thesis without insisting on a major re-write.

I've worked with Hugh Kennedy from the OP. A real nice guy in person, actually. I didn't notice him showing off his vocabulary in our meetings, but then again, I'm a History PhD student myself so I might not notice.

I have written sentences in my own thesis where I've looked back at it and thought: wow that sounds like academic snobery (score!).

Virtualscratchbuilder – subject sounds interesting. What book is that from??

It was a made up example to emphasis how I feel about a book I have.

Hmmmmmmmm.
When I first read the title, I thought it was asking, nay BEGGING me to tell once again thev story of my encounter with a certain sci-fi writer who so many inexplicably read and respect.

But, I guess I was wrong. No need for name-dropping after all.

For what its worth, John, I was thinking of exactly the same person when I first read the subject line.

I agree with Parzival, writers that write like that should not be considered "good".

Harlan Ellison, no, not him

Pat

"I thought it was asking, nay BEGGING me to tell once again the story…"

I'm asking, I'm begging! Tell it!

When I bagan writing ACW history, a good friend told me that a book which has really great history in it is useless if no one can read it.

I have been criticized time and again because my battle books read like novels where the reader becomes part of the action and where I write in the active tense without delving into the historiography within the text.

As a kid growing up in the 50s, I loved to read the "You are there" books because they transported me into the past without puttig me to sleep. History is useless if the reader cannot understand what the writer is saying because the text has to come with its own dictionary.

Like stated above, term paper (thesis) history is entirely different from readable history.

I don't write to prove how well read and intelligent I am. Anyone who knows me personally will tell you that I am not either. To me, good story telling is good historical writing.

I have been able to translate my historical writing into miniature wargaming.

Thank you. John Michael Priest