Quote Originally Posted by Storyvillenight View Post
Agree. I was always taught that a simple word is best. On a related trend: good books used to be 150-200 pages long, now it seems 800 is the minimum....600 of which are pointless and tedious waffle....a good editor would sort this problem and yours.
You raise a good point. I remember reading "The Stand" by Stephen King when I was in college. 823 pages. I lost interest in the read multiple times back then because the book was so shockingly long. The book took me months to finish in my undergraduate senior year, fall semester. I had forgotten about this trend until you mentioned it. And you are correct. A good editor would most likely have noticed and corrected this. Although, if the editor is of the same mindset, he/she may actually embrace the use of obscure words. As if the use of obscure vocabulary is showing high intelligence and a skill for high level writing.

It will be interesting to see where literature and public reading migrates to in the future. I read that some have noted where if you ride a subway in New York, you will see a trend toward young people actually reading paper books. Whereas older adults past the age of 40 are typically reading eBooks like Amazon's Kindle. I found that interesting at first. 20 year olds migrating back to paper, while 40 year plus adults are going purely electronic. You'd think it would be the other way around. Then I remembered that in my other avocation (High Fidelity and Vinyl Records), that young people are migrating back toward old fashioned records, while 40 plus adults continue to embrace Compact Disc.