[SCL] Remark for fun: presentation styles

[Tanel Tammet]

Hi,

During the interesting discussion about abstractness
and analytic/synthetic discussions the preferences
in the overall writing _style_  inevitably crop up.

The following remarks abut style are not really
connected to SCL at all, they are here just for fun.

I am also aware that when it comes to the analysis
of style, then I am a total amateur with nothing
really new to say, so I just mention obvious ideas
which happened to come to my head.

The writing style (and discourse style in general)
is strongly influenced by the cultural background
in a wide and vague sense.

But we could (vaguely) categorise the styles of
both mathematical and juridical discourse by
paradigmatic cultures like this,  for example:

- at one end of the spectrum we have the "german" style:
   - highly abstract
   - extreme attention to all small details
   - few examples
 
- in the middle we have:
    a) "british" style with
        - mediocre level of abstractness
        - mediocre attention to small details
        - many examples
    b) "american" style, which is necessarily similar, but:
        - examples are even more important
        - pragmatical aspects of readability are
           more important
      
- at the opposite end of the spectrum we have "russian" style:
     - highly abstract
     - very small attention to details: huge amounts of gaps and vagueness
     - few, if any, examples

What is interesting is that apparently the mathematical
style is similar to the juridical system of the country,
hence reflecting the "general"  style of discourse.

Personally, being Estonian,  I have been influenced by a large
number of very different styles (similar situation to the
american "melting pot"), for example, finding the pragmatical
aspects like easy readability highly important. This "melting
pot" style appears to be the common case in the other small
and exotic countries of the northern europe as well, as far
as I have observed.

Regards,
          Tanel Tammet





John F. Sowa wrote:

> Chris,
>
> Point noted:
>
> > Well, I do find it virtuously elegant, but more
> > readable?  "There is a collection of analytic/selector
> > operators on SCL formulas with the nine subgroup
> > clusters in one-one correspondence with the nine
> > synthetic/constructor operators (their inverse)..."
> > Now *I* like that way of talking, but it sure sounds
> > like the same sort of discourse you randomly excoriate
> > in the current document.
>
> Sorry.  Robert is another author whose prose I often
> excoriate.  I suppose in a weak moment I thought it was
> more readable because it didn't have as many occurrences
> of the words "clearly" and "intuitively".
>
> John
>
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