"The Logic and Rhetoric of Exposition"

Posted by reverendmartian
Sep 6, 2012 at 11:10 PM

I disagree, and, I think, so would Jacques Barzun, author of “Simple & Direct,” the pre-eminent tome on rhetoric for writers. Dean Barzun favored compound and complex sentences because complex relationships cannot accurately shown by using simple sentences. They need to be linked or subordinated in one sentence if possible. Ditto about your prescription about short paragraphs. Paragraphs have to do with developing ideas; and I would argue that you are not seeing all the relationships among ideas in a paragraph comprised of a few short sentences. If an idea truly has only one facet, then it is simple and self-evident and probably unworthy of any exposition, short or long. Check out the length of Dan Dennett’s paragraphs in any of his books—-typically 20 or more long sentences, all of which hang together nicely. On balance, I would rather be convicted of being long-winded than simple-minded. Besides, your criticism is paradoxical on an outliner software forum in which some topics are regarded as being so complex we need a computer to help us break them down into their constitutent parts. If a topic could be sufficiently covered in a few short sentences and a few short paragraphs, we presumably could keep all of that data in our heads rather than commiting it to paper, digital or otherwise.

My complaints about some posts from some newcomers are that the posts are irrelevant to the forum’s raison d’etre and ostentatious
displays of verbosity. More than that is better left unsaid.