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<blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 1392401" data-attributes="member: 5171">Ditto liking the longer versions better.&nbsp; Jes, your language was clunky in the condensed versions.&nbsp; It was compact, yes, but it was compact in that everything was jammed together clunkily.&nbsp; As an argument, that doesn't convince me that it objectively needed to be shorter.You are making arbitrary judgments about what is important and what is not.&nbsp; For what it's worth, I agree with you on most of what you said, and that's why I don't tell the Odyssey as a 16-word story. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile&nbsp; &nbsp; :)"&nbsp; data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />I deny your objective standard for detail and subtlety.&nbsp; There might be one, but the tone of your review does not convince me that you're the one to deliver it.&nbsp; Where you see overwritten prose, other people are seeing beauty.&nbsp; And your shorter sections were clunky and, well, bad.You're fine to say, &quot;The level of detail didn't add anything for me,&quot; but your flat assertion that, from an objective viewpoint, the prose is overwritten does not stand up to logical scrutiny.&nbsp; You're using very logical arguments to build up an inherently subjective premise, but your premise is always going to be subjective: The prose was unnecessarily verbose in your opinion.&nbsp; That's what you can say without fear of attack.&nbsp; People might disagree, but they won't attack your opinion.By the same argument you're using, one could say that you could improve a symphony by making it shorter but keeping the same detail and subtlety -- and that an ideal way to do that is to remove all the rests and double the tempo.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="takyris, post: 1392401, member: 5171"] Ditto liking the longer versions better. Jes, your language was clunky in the condensed versions. It was compact, yes, but it was compact in that everything was jammed together clunkily. As an argument, that doesn't convince me that it objectively needed to be shorter. You are making arbitrary judgments about what is important and what is not. For what it's worth, I agree with you on most of what you said, and that's why I don't tell the Odyssey as a 16-word story. :) I deny your objective standard for detail and subtlety. There might be one, but the tone of your review does not convince me that you're the one to deliver it. Where you see overwritten prose, other people are seeing beauty. And your shorter sections were clunky and, well, bad. You're fine to say, "The level of detail didn't add anything for me," but your flat assertion that, from an objective viewpoint, the prose is overwritten does not stand up to logical scrutiny. You're using very logical arguments to build up an inherently subjective premise, but your premise is always going to be subjective: The prose was unnecessarily verbose in your opinion. That's what you can say without fear of attack. People might disagree, but they won't attack your opinion. By the same argument you're using, one could say that you could improve a symphony by making it shorter but keeping the same detail and subtlety -- and that an ideal way to do that is to remove all the rests and double the tempo. [/QUOTE]

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