Cheerskep's hectoring us about the perils of fuzziness and imprecise
thinking leaves one thing unsaid -- I mean, one notion uninvoked --
namely: Why does CSKP not rail against poor writing? It is not
uncommon to read messages with garbled organization or expression,
with idiosyntactic constructions, with peculiar punctuation. I am not
thinking -- and neither should you -- of the occasional typo or
misspelling, a degree of casualness in phrasing, or the awkwardness of
a message in the writer's second language. I'm talking about cloudy
writing, usually a deficit of clarity in the use of language and
grammatical forms, but occasionally a surfeit of turgid, congested,
highly formalized prose.
How can one get a reasonably congruent idea from a message that
wanders and ambles somewhat aimlessly past vague antecedents,
ambiguous punctuation, inscrutable predicates, and other pitfalls in
the verbal landscape?
To keep this notion abreast of today's other topic, can one say what
one means to say (can one make the intended image) if one cannot
command the language (cannot draw)?
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Michael Brady
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
