If you want to say something sensible about the art of writing, you're treading on dangerous ground because expression is the exercise of freedom, and the moment you posit a dictum, a credo, or any sort of rule—however innocuous—well, somebody's going to feel straitjacketed by it and the next thing you know the villagers are at the portcullis with pitchforks and flaming brands.

Take spelling, f'rinstance. I once had the temerity to suggest that, all things considered, making an effort to avoid typograpical errors was probably a good idea. This outlandish opinion netted me the unenviable reputation of being some kind of linguistic fascist, so you can see that arriving at a consensus on something more weighty like usage is an exercise fraught with peril.

That's why the experts take pains to construct air-tight arguments about language, because there's always some squealing punk out there who's all too happy to come forward and show you his Klingon Blog or whatnot, and you have to be prepared for that.

Still, the arguments against the use of correct spelling and grammar are worth considering and I'm going to dispense with them first, so we can talk like adults here. First is the "Webloggers are busy" position. This requires us to imagine that Shakespeare and Einstein are sharing a computer, both have exactly 85 seconds to write and post their blogs, and they're fighting over the keyboard. Whatever they have to say, the theory goes, is going to be worth reading and we should make allowances for its poor execution. Well, once or twice we will, but if it's a consistent pattern we should expect these people to engage in a little time management strategizing.

Then there's the "psychotic blogger" position. According to this, the author is a "free spirit," an unchained rebel, and what's more, he or she doesn't pay a fig to readership or legibility. This blogger is writing for no one, and might very well post a single period, or maybe a random string of letters and numbers, depending on the whim of the moment. Yet to the extent that the psychoblogger doesn't care what readers might think, the readers likewise won't care what this blogger has to say, either. They'll vanish and they won't be back.

As it happens, most writers worry to some extent about whether they're "doing it right" since nobody wants to look foolish in public, and the words we use and the way we use them do tend to say something about us and, given the choice, we'd prefer to project a positive image.

Since I think about these kinds of things a great deal, I pay close attention when others do, and an entry titled Writing Better by Dave at How to Save the World caught my eye because in it he raises some questions that aren't immediately answerable: Can writing be "too dense"? Is turgidity in prose a fault? Should complex sentences be simplified? And, in a larger sense, is style subordinate to habituation?

Rather than addressing these questions directly, it is worth a few moments to consider the context in which they arise. Here, the field of operations is Weblogging, as distinguished from, say, writing a technical paper. But is that distinction a meaningful one? Some Weblogs are personal journals, some are collections of hyperlinks, some express opinion, some focus on specific matters, and some are oriented toward technical issues; thus we come full circle and must conclude that any observations appropriate to writing in general must ipso facto apply to Weblogging. This observation does imply, though, that advice appropriate to one style of writing does not necessarily extend to any other.

Yet we might ask if there are any universal considerations that apply to writing, and, if so, is the injunction to avoid complexity—density, if you like—among them? Let's survey a few general guidelines and then return to this question.

Writing is communicative. Hardly a far-fetched notion, I agree, but we should be thorough. This suggests that whatever improves the process of getting an idea from the mind of the writer into that of the reader is of value; and conversely, that which impedes communication can be termed a fault worthy of excision.

Writing is expressive. Unlike some other languages—French comes to mind—that when rendered into print tend to mask the personality of the writer, the complexity of English encourages its writers to develop highly idiosyncratic styles.

Writing is contextual. Simply as noted above, humorous writing is entertaining, journalism is informative, and technical writing is precise. Depending on the purpose, the communicative function may be subordinated to entertainment, or vice versa. Our psychotic blogger is thus purely expressive and eschews locative and communicative values wholesale.

Now we can turn to the question of density in writing. I see turgidity in prose arising in two ways: accidentally and intentionally. We'll examine each in turn.

First, I fully agree with Dave that accidental complexity is a fault. For example, consider this passage by literary lightweight Gregg Easterbrook:

Protestants in Northern Ireland tend to be well-off and Anglophile; Catholics, to be working class and to want the Brits out.

This vertiginous thought, with its several analogues in the "clash of civilizations" argument, has not yet met with its defining author. Most writing thus far either has been a product of immediate events or has been subsumed into them by becoming a part of the battle itself.

Everyone is familiar with George Orwell's widely circulated essay Politics and the English Language, in which he argues forcefully against the sorts of crimes that Hitchens commits for a living. Orwell suggests that a careful writer, "in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions," namely:

1. What am I trying to say?
2. What words will express it?
3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

And he will probably ask himself two more:

1. Could I put it more shortly?
2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

I've repeatedly found that when the audience is mostly poor and less educated, I can skip lots of the background and "frame of reference" issues because it's already obvious and taken for granted by everyone, and can proceed to matters that occupy all of us. With more educated audiences, that's much harder; it's necessary to disentangle lots of ideological constructions.

But a writer like William Buckley tends to push the language (and his readers' patience) a bit harder because he knows they aren't listening to Limp Bizkit:

New York Episcopal Bishop (retired) Paul Moore has been criticizing America for years, inveighing against poverty, corporate greed, racism, nuclear arms, military spending, and war, which is okay, but oughtn't to be thought uniquely American inventions. Indeed, some clergy short-circuited such respect as they'd be thought ex officio to have by their categorical alienation from America.

On this view philosophy is supposed not only, and not in the first place, to be a theoretical science, but to give practical guidance to our view of things and their interconnection and our attitudes toward them, and to regulate and direct our interpretation of existence and its meaning.

While I was assembling these thoughts, by the way, I ran across Monty Python's Philosopher's Drinking Song, which goes in part:

Immanuel Kant was a real pissant
who was very rarely stable.
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar
who could think you under the table.

4:10:24 PM