The pretense comes from our need to look and not be, transition exercise from journaling to massaging
- The strange thing that I didn’t notice before reading about it in Methods of Writing. When I communicate with somebody important, I involuntarily gravitate toward a somewhat pretentious style — literary, elevated, the one I usually don’t use. I seem to feel the need to sound “rich” or “posh,” don’t I?
- Jack, in his work, argues that nowadays we live in a post-literate society1. Yet over time — century after century, decade after decade, year after year — we’ve been trained, conditioned by school and by the works of great minds of the past, to use elaborate literary forms and dense, extended sentences. Hence, even though we are now living in a post-literate society, one that relies mostly on short textual exchanges, we still tend to adopt a literary tone when writing about something important.
- Or things we think are important to us in some way. Notes are certainly among them, but even though they matter, we write them primarily for ourselves, and therefore we must sound natural to ourselves.
- Jack, in his work, argues that nowadays we live in a post-literate society1. Yet over time — century after century, decade after decade, year after year — we’ve been trained, conditioned by school and by the works of great minds of the past, to use elaborate literary forms and dense, extended sentences. Hence, even though we are now living in a post-literate society, one that relies mostly on short textual exchanges, we still tend to adopt a literary tone when writing about something important.
- Let me give an example of a natural and an unnatural sentence:
- Literate: The big green car sped quickly down the long narrow street.
- Natural: The car drove down that street.
- The second sentence is understood at first glance; the reader grasps the gist far faster than in the first one. It lacks adjectives, adverbs, and any markers of forced importance. The syntax of this sentence sounds natural when read aloud — this quality is called “prosody.”
- More on this concept in the next note, along with an exercise on how to spot, assess, and correct literary style.
BIO
🧠 theBrain mapping
ID: 202511190818 Source:: Friend:: Child:: Next:: The concept of prosody or how to check to syntax of natural speech in your note
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Footnotes
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The best way I can understand it is the society that uses more short messages than long form, but I need to analyze further the concept of post-literacy. ↩