Post by account_disabled on Jan 5, 2024 23:53:38 GMT -6
The most read writing manuals today, especially the English ones, push the writer towards a form of simple writing, whose task of the words becomes simply that of transmitting the sensory information useful for visualizing the scene. This is perhaps due to the fact that the inexperienced writer, not yet having sufficient mastery over the form to be able to be powerful by using only what is indispensable, tends to develop a baroque form which, although it may initially seem more effective, only makes the situation worse ( and this is not because the baroque form is bad in itself, but only because it is even more difficult to manage so many rhetorical elements).
Once sufficient experience has been acquired, however, the author should try to move away from this "basic style": it is no longer sufficient that the form simply transmits the information of the content, but must Special Data become information itself; we need to develop our own rhetoric in which form and content are one, and both point towards the communication of a given effect. To understand what I mean, let's see how some great authors have achieved this agreement between form and content. Syntax “That branch of Lake Como which turns towards the south between two uninterrupted chains of mountains, all in creeks and gulfs, depending on the protrusion and retreat of those, almost suddenly narrows and takes on the course and shape of a river, between a promontory on the right and a wide opposite river; and the bridge, which connects.
Banks there, seems to make this transformation even more visible to the eye, and marks the point where the lake ceases, and the Adda begins again, to then take back the name of lake where the banks, moving away again, leave the water relaxes and loosens into new gulfs and new bays.” (A. Manzoni, The Betrothed) You may like the incipit of The Betrothed or not; but beyond the fact that it is probably too slow for the modern reader, there is no denying that it is written in a thoughtful style. We note how the powerful hypotaxis of the period unfolds in increasingly fragmented sentences. The concepts are also arranged in a "tortuous" way: lake - mountains - creeks and gulfs - river - promontory - riviera - lake - creeks and gulfs. There is a continuous alternation of the terrestrial element and the water element. I didn't say "tortuous" by chance: it's a tortuous period... just as the landscape it describes is tortuous! Manzoni does not limit himself to describing a complex landscape, but he transmits this complexity through the form of the period he describes.
Once sufficient experience has been acquired, however, the author should try to move away from this "basic style": it is no longer sufficient that the form simply transmits the information of the content, but must Special Data become information itself; we need to develop our own rhetoric in which form and content are one, and both point towards the communication of a given effect. To understand what I mean, let's see how some great authors have achieved this agreement between form and content. Syntax “That branch of Lake Como which turns towards the south between two uninterrupted chains of mountains, all in creeks and gulfs, depending on the protrusion and retreat of those, almost suddenly narrows and takes on the course and shape of a river, between a promontory on the right and a wide opposite river; and the bridge, which connects.
Banks there, seems to make this transformation even more visible to the eye, and marks the point where the lake ceases, and the Adda begins again, to then take back the name of lake where the banks, moving away again, leave the water relaxes and loosens into new gulfs and new bays.” (A. Manzoni, The Betrothed) You may like the incipit of The Betrothed or not; but beyond the fact that it is probably too slow for the modern reader, there is no denying that it is written in a thoughtful style. We note how the powerful hypotaxis of the period unfolds in increasingly fragmented sentences. The concepts are also arranged in a "tortuous" way: lake - mountains - creeks and gulfs - river - promontory - riviera - lake - creeks and gulfs. There is a continuous alternation of the terrestrial element and the water element. I didn't say "tortuous" by chance: it's a tortuous period... just as the landscape it describes is tortuous! Manzoni does not limit himself to describing a complex landscape, but he transmits this complexity through the form of the period he describes.