From: mdhangton@gmail.com   
      
   It happens that Michelle Bottorff formulated :   
   > William Vetter  wrote:   
   >   
   >>> The truth is that a "typical reader" doesn't want to be made to feel   
   >>> stupid or be asked to *work* when they sit down to read a book.   
   >   
   >   
   >> When I think about diction levels in my writing, I don't resent the   
   >> reader as being lazy or stupid; I ask myself whether I am blitzing him.   
   >   
   > When I think about diction levels in my writing, I'm usually not   
   > thinking about the reader at all.  I'm thinking about the character I am   
   > writing as.   
      
   When I write in POV character voices, and the diction level of the   
   character is modest, I do.  But when the character is well-educated, an   
   aristocrat of his race, this becomes an issue that I give   
   consideration.   
   I think it doesn't matter to send a reader to his dictionary every few   
   pages, but you lose when you begin to blitz him.   
      
   I found a book at the library named _Write Tight_, and brought it home.   
   I read some parts of it; it was about compression and writing in   
   not-florid language.   
      
   For a few years, I was taking pictures for a guy at NASA Glenn, and he   
   sent me a manuscript with my name on the masthead for to   
   comment/correct.  And this guy was otherwise very agreeable to work   
   with, but it took me hours to figure out what he was even talking about   
   when I read his manuscripts.  It was full of lines like   
   "The substrate was reticulated."   
   And I was perhaps a person most qualified to know what he was doing   
   because I worked with him.  But I'd need to guess that this meant "A   
   grid was etched on the surface," and then make guesses about the rest   
   then go over it all to see if all my guesses made sense together.  He   
   never spoke like this; it seemed that he believed that making the ms.   
   cryptic would foster his career.   
   Once, I was at a conference at BNL and in the poster session, I heard   
   some guy bragging.  I think he was some sort of biochemical structure   
   crystallographer, some Ivy League associate professor or grad student   
   who hung around long enough to become a majordomo.  People like that   
   schmooze a lot.  He was bragging about how his paper was passed by the   
   referees because he made it incomprehensible.   
      
   So, I can see what value a book like _Write Tight_ has, but I got to a   
   place where the author said he ran the first page of _A Tale of Two   
   Cities_, by Charles Dickens, through a computer program.  His software   
   told him that, to understand _A Tale of Two Cities_, a reader needed 96   
   years of education.  He then provided a dumbed-down text of page 1 of   
   AToTC to show how Dickens should have written it properly.  I had read   
   about 40 pages of this book, but that was when I gave up.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)