Lionel Shriver is a crap writer. Witness:
For it’s more the case that the EU is a bloated bureaucracy packed with pampered timeservers inventing gratuitous regulations to justify their sinecures.
The first sentence of the second paragraph of a piece in Harper’s. That’s a crap sentence. “more the case that” – why use a clunker like that? “bloated bureaucracy packed with pampered” – have you no ear?? Then that long string of lifeless stale words. It’s just a terrible sentence, and there’s something wrong with a writer who doesn’t notice.
And that kind of thing makes a difference, because it makes the reader suspect she’s not really thinking about what she’s saying, but just rolling out a punditty reaction. And she does it again in the very next sentence – “the profligate, power-hungry body has warped into a centralizing political project without asking the irrelevant little peons” – come on. Way too many Ps for one sentence, coupled with stale pseudo-opinion.
She needs a better editor.
Comments
8 responses to “A pint of pickled peppers”
Always avoid annoying alliteration.
Is she ‘channeling’ Spiro Agnew?
Apparently afflicted with a pronounced penchant for pretentious prolixity.
This is the sort of thing I see in a lot of the plays written by members of my playwriting group – I think it’s a problem of educated people who want you to know how ‘smart’ they are, and they aren’t smart enough to realize that if you’re really smart, you don’t need to write like this.
And that in fact it’s a really dumb idea to write like this because it makes you look like a bad writer.
Well, I say that, yet there she is in Harper’s, so apparently it doesn’t.
I seriously don’t understand where the editor was.
I’ve read one of her novels, and liked it very much.
But that was fiction.
AWOL!
Or that her thinking on the subject is a sloppy mishmash of axioms popular with her tribe.
There’s a lot of that going around.
I’ve discovered that the key is often to string together long words that people don’t quite understand. Instead of thinking you’re spouting word salad, a lot of intelligent people will think that if they don’t understand it, the writer must be on some extremely higher plane of existence and intelligence and will fall all over themselves to praise the writer.
If they would just stop and parse what it really said, they would often realize it says…nothing much at all, and certainly not anything particularly smart.
That’s more in academic enclaves like “Theory,” I think. This is more the kind of thing Orwell blasted in P & the EL: familiar but mildly high-falutin’ words that aren’t actually hard to understand for anyone likely to be reading Harper’s in the first place, but are just…imprecise, cluttered, clotted, worn out, stale – fine used sparingly & where actually needed, but not shaken out of a box of latinate words for the hell of it.