Before I do take a break however, and in spite of any fandom confetti comments he may receive for managing to enunciate very narrowly correct and obvious points, I shall not pass on this opportunity to report a year-long observation of mine:
"Good writing is concrete writing, I often tell my students."Wrong. "Good" writing, at least in the context of the kind of article he is referring to, is clear writing; the fault he highlights would be more accurately apprehended as a decontextualized misuse of abstractions, i.e. an insufficiency of context to establish clarity. That this was likely deliberate is beside the point I am making here: to refer from abstracts to "concrete" instances is merely a tool of clarity, not to be taken as an end of good writing in and of itself. To insist on concrete writing is either an inadvertent admission of, or subtle insistence upon, a more or less concrete-bound epistemology. That is something which may also be called, with perfect accuracy, and with no aspersions whatsoever cast upon people with unfortunate disabilities - a retardation.
On the general topic of the U.S. selling out Taiwan, I have only a very short question: who voted for Barack Obama?
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comment moderation is now in place, as of April 2012. Rules:
1) Be aware that your right to say what you want is circumscribed by my right of ownership here.
2) Make your comments relevant to the post to which they are attached.
3) Be careful what you presume: always be prepared to evince your point with logic and/or facts.
4) Do not transgress Blogger's rules regarding content, i.e. do not express hatred for other people on account of their ethnicity, age, gender, sexual orientation or nationality.
5) Remember that only the best are prepared to concede, and only the worst are prepared to smear.