From: Marilyn Brakhage (email suppressed)
Date: Sat Oct 15 2005 - 12:12:25 PDT
On the other hand, even people who try to write in a clear style are
being frequently misunderstood. While I am certainly guilty of many
errors, including an occasional misplaced comma -- unintentional, and
therefore worse (more confusing) than Cari's intentional ones -- I
think that I'm not terribly difficult to understand. And we can't
expect perfection of writing style in such a forum. Yet it was
suggested that I had critiqued Leslie's film unseen, which I never did.
(I was restating my understanding of what others had said and asking
for clarification or further explanation). And Keith appeared to not
understand that my answer to his Brakhage parallel was indeed
addressing the parallel, and was intended to clarify my point about how
one might respond to a question/charge such as Cari's. So if we're
going to be critiquing the clarity of people's writing, while we're at
it, I'd like to ask some people to read a little more carefully too.
Marilyn
On Saturday, October 15, 2005, at 08:11 AM, James Kreul wrote:
> Thank you Genevieve. Obviously from my previous posts I completely
> agree with you. I think this sentiment has been lurking in the
> background in several posts. As more people express frustration with
> the style, hopefully it will become clear that ideas and arguments are
> actually being obscured or misunderstood because of the style. After
> my apology I realized that it was just adding to the confusion by even
> attempting to crack the code. At this point the thread is winding
> down anyway, but I would suggest that we take a step back and realize
> that half of this has been miscommunication or misinterpretation of
> tone.
>
>
> James Kreul
> UNC-Wilmington
> email suppressed
>
>
> On 10/15/05 6:09 AM, "Genevieve Yue" <email suppressed> wrote:
>
> I want to weigh in on the issue of clarity, because I think it is a
> relevant one. I am genuinely having a hard time understanding exactly
> what Cari means to say. I greatly respect an individual's cultivation
> of a distinctive voice and style, but not at the sacrifice of meaning.
> And in Cari's recent posts, there have been many
> alternative/misspellings and punctuation omissions that invite a great
> deal of ambiguity, confusion and hence, misinterpretation. This is
> beyond the logic of style; when language is impenetrable it is
> useless, at least in the context of an informed discussion. We should
> mean what we say, of course, and in a virtual forum such as
> Frameworks, it is all the more critical that we say what we mean.
>
> Genevieve Yue
>
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