Hello Friend

This bit in the NYT Mag about David Foster Wallace and the modern style of writing he helped spawn hits remarkably close to home. I struggle to strip my writing of qualifying word, lulz jargon, parenthetical asides and ironic punctuation. Sometimes I can’t do it. Sometimes I just don’t want to. (Lots of my favorite web writers do this stuff all the time, and they’re very entertaining. It’s not all bad!) But I do think this piece is valid. 

Qualifications are necessary sometimes. Anticipating and defusing opposing arguments has been a vital rhetorical strategy since at least the days of Aristotle. Satire and ridicule, when done well, are high art. But the idea is to provoke and persuade, not to soothe. And the best way to make an argument is to make it, straightforwardly, honestly, passionately, without regard to whether people will like you afterward.