{"id":187128,"date":"2014-02-11T14:27:01","date_gmt":"2014-02-11T22:27:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.unz.com\/?post_type=gnxp&#038;p=25317"},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-30T08:00:00","slug":"writing-wrong-well","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/2014\/02\/11\/writing-wrong-well\/","title":{"rendered":"Writing wrong well"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This <a href=\"http:\/\/urbantimes.co\/2014\/01\/norman-finkelstein-interview\/\">opinion by Norman Finkelstein<\/a> on writing really spoke to me:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Yeah there\u2019s definitely a place for style and creativity, for good writers it\u2019s definitely an advantage to have. The problem is when \u2013 maybe this is going to sound patronizing \u2013 but when <strong>English majors decide they want to do politics<\/strong> and they have no background in the field of inquiry and that\u2019s quite common. There\u2019s a left-wing tradition of that and they have deep roots but the most obvious prototype was Trotsky who was a revolutionist part of the day and as he famously had done, as he\u2019s under sealed train going to the front waging the civil war in Russia, he\u2019s writing literary criticism. And Trotsky was both a brilliant political analyst and brilliant literary critic. He happened to combine both.<\/p>\n<p>But most people don\u2019t and what you have now is versions of George Packer, Paul Berman. There\u2019s just a large number of people who know nothing about politics, don\u2019t even think it\u2019s important to do the research side. They simply substitute the clever turn of phrase. The main exemplar of that in recent times was\u00a0<a title=\"Christopher Hitchens\" href=\"http:\/\/urbantimes.co\/magazine\/2012\/01\/christopher-hitchens-israel-and-beit-shemesh\/\">Christopher Hitchens<\/a>,\u00a0who really hadn\u2019t a clue what he was talking about. <strong>But what he would do is come up with three arcane facts, and with these three arcane facts he would weave a long essay.<\/strong> So people say, oh look at that.\u00a0They would react in wonder at one or the other pieces of arcana and then take him for a person who is knowledgable.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>People unfortunately don\u2019t care very much about content. They care about cleverness.<\/strong> That\u2019s the basis on which\u00a0<em>The New York Review of Books<\/em>\u00a0recruits its authors, you have to be as they say, a good writer. And the same thing with\u00a0<em>The New Yorker<\/em>. Now obviously there\u2019s a great virtue to being a good writer, but not when it\u2019s a substitute for content.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>He&#8217;s alluding to a general, not specific, problem. It isn&#8217;t just brilliant prose stylists who can pull a fast one. Engagement, and the ability to weave a good story, is one of the reasons why someone like <a href=\"http:\/\/andrewgelman.com\/2013\/10\/11\/gladwell-vs-chabris-david-vs-goliath\/\">Malcolm Gladwell<\/a> is such a great success. But there&#8217;s a flip side: <b>truth need not come in an obscure and awkward package.<\/b> Great scientists such as Charles Darwin were also great communicators. The unfortunate reality though is that for far too many of the chattering class science as filtered through <i>The New Yorker<\/i> <i>is<\/i> science. The same with history, politics, and foreign affairs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This opinion by Norman Finkelstein on writing really spoke to me: Yeah there\u2019s definitely a place for style and creativity, for good writers it\u2019s definitely an advantage to have. The [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-187128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pawqfx-MGc","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187128"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187128\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}