You should've given more samples in your reading. The glaring difference between Tolkien and Sanderson was Tolkien was plodding and methodical about the visceral experience of the surroundings, and Sanderson was a poignant synopsis of actions from an eagle eye perspective. So, the comparisons weren't apples to apples.
Very very interesting. I find Erickson to be very poetic, but like this showed, not quite to Tolkien or rothfuss' level. He is MUCH more poetic than Sanderson, though. This goes to show that sometimes written word is more than the sum of it's parts :) great video!!!
I'm definitely someone who reads for language and not mostly for plot. And I think I like both (extreme) ends of the spectrum the most. Super descriptive prose with unnecessarily long sentences, as well as very choppy and broken down prose. I love Cormac McCarthy for example and I've read all of Donna Tartt's novels even though only one of them had a plot and characters I even found remotely likable or intersting. So I think the one thing I can definitely say I find no pleasure in is "simple" prose.
Very interesting. I miss a thorough discussion of why these metrics were chosen. Also, at 6:49 I don't see how 44 + 18 adds up to 64. But that is of lesser importance. (5 /34 = 15 % latin origin words here.)
What gets me to STOP reading a book is when they have too many characters with similar sounding names, have characters with difficult to pronounce names, have too many characters with a similar appearance, or just have too many characters introduced in a short time. I just started reading a new book yesterday and there were 9 characters introduced in the first chapter. Seriously? Even something like ST TNG only has 8 main characters most of the time and that is after having an entire TV series and movies so people are already very familiar with each character going in to any books. Reading a new book with no previously established characters and introducing 9 + in the first chapter seems like bad writing to me. (I won't name the book because I don't want to run down a specific author).
Okay, I'm confused. I have the regular set with the dust covers, but mine does not have the Harper Collins logo like yours does. My copies have a cursive WM in that spot on the spine, and on the inside, it says William Morrow. Other than that, my books are identical to yours. What gives?
I'll take Sanderson's more digestible prose, a style that may not wow me with every word, over Rothfuss' admittedly beautiful prose if it means I get more than one piece of literature every quarter-century.
I just love their Liaden Universe books and am working on collecting them all. I was very sorry to learn of Steve's death earlier this year (2024). But I hope Sharon can keep the series going. Thanks for the great interview, Craig.
Sanderson's Prose, is nothing special. In fact, i think he lacks it entirely. Prose isnt his object though. it is the story itself, that his focus and power lies.
I have the Harper Collins leather pocket edition of the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit has illustration by J.R.R. Tolkien. And colored maps too.
I would love to know if the new deluxe three-volume boxed edition of LotR has sewn bindings. I'm really tired of publishers of hardbacks using glued bindings. If you're going to do that, you might as well just release it as a paperback.
You don't feel like your metrics are a tad bit arbitrary? Not even a little? Because A. Accessibility is arguably just as important, and B. Why does it matter what the root origin of a word is? It's all English at the end of the day. And besides that fact, a work having more Germanic words vs. Latin arguably makes it less pleasant to read, given that Romance languages are considered overall more beautiful and poetic to most audiences vs. Germanic languages which are seen as harsh and stilted.
I tee why you'd compare an "average" paragraph from each, but i don't think it would have hurt to find 2 paragraphs with more similar total word count so that the other features bear a more accurate comparison (sample size) but i see why you did what you did
Also, the Silmarillion is basically split into 5 parts: *Ainulindalë* - the Creation Myth; *Valaquenta* - the history of the Valar; *Quenta Silmarillion* - the main portion dealing with the mythical stories of the First Age; *Akallabêth* - the Second Age story of the downfall of Númenor; *Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age* - an account of the making of the Rings and Sauron's deception and his defeat in the War of the Last Alliance. The first two can be skipped without hindering your enjoyment of the Quenta Silmarillion - which is the meat of the thing. You can always go back to them and read them whenever. Also, the Akallabêth and Rings of Power parts can be read as standalone things whenever you want.
Way too surface level to draw any real conclusions from this. Would be good to do this analysis across an entire book for each author, or at the very least 20 different paragraphs and plot the data to see what the variance is like for a given author. That said, PoV is a good one, as is the tense. Rothfuss is largely first person, Sanderson third, Jemesin 2nd (at least, far as I can recall from the first Broken Earth). These have huge influence on the way something feels and tastes as a reader. Very subjective, of course. Still, interesting analysis, thanks.
8:52 Perhaps “seat” would have been a good Germanic substitute for “chair”. 11:03 and perhaps “setback” or “hitch” for “problem”, though those might not fit depending on context.
Part of the problem is not so much the language, but the length of narrative you need to go through to just get to the main dramatis personae. You have the Ainulindale creation story, the list of the Ainu characters in the Valaquenta and then its narrative about them until Chapter 5 of the Quenta Silmarillion before you get the list of virtually entirely F-names who we follow from that point on. If you can make it past those six paragraphs (in conjunction with the first family tree), you'll be fine from then on.
I know I’m 2 years late but I’ve just started to collect J R.R token books and so far I have the hobbit deluxe illustrated edition and the SILMARILLION deluxe illustrated edition and so far they are worth it I’m going to get the LOTR one next and they do look nice on my shelf so I do think expensive versions are worth it and both of them are leather bound ones
I think it may all boil down to subjectivity and opinion, but I literally know nothing about reading and writing. I've only been doing it for forty or so years, and I still have so much to learn on the subject.
Uncertainty or incoherency? Is Wolfe writing to confound critics? You can't point out the plot holes without a plot, can you? The first 4 books of the New Testament are different versions of basically the same story. All coherent. Is Wolfe giving different accounts from the same character or different accounts from different perspectives of the same character?
Other teams of outriders were spared those two lots. They'd used ladders that could stretch out to great lengths to scale flat-topped hills amid highstorms. Many men were lost, however, as they were unshielded on these hills; they couldn't bring wagons or other shelter with them into the clefts. But the greater blight, he'd heard, had been the Parshendi watchmen, who had found and killed scores of outrider teams. I felt like I had to rephrase a lot of things to make the prose sound good. (_it wasn't good prose to begin with..._) Swapping words doesn't work - it's almost as if you have to think in a different language.
@Milton2k I didn't include purely made up words and names in either category. Been a while, so I can't recall off the top of my head, but I'm guessing those passages didn't have any of those.
I would like to add on the matter of balance. If you look at Dante, in his New Life, he writes "Woman who have the intellect of love." Whereas in the world of antiquity love and intellect are seen as opposition, as love as something that is of lust, such as Roma written backwards is Amor, an empire of passion, it was for the first time with Dante that love has been started to see as something that moves us towards intellect. He says after the comment of woman with intellect of love, that he has to go seek himself, to grow capable of speak nobler about a particular woman, then comes the Divine Comedy. I believe that the resolution to the balance between Justice and Love in the essay lies here: It is the power of prose for us to bring into surface the force that gives birth to justice in the first place. Prose is the realm of justice, but good prose often, and always I believe, drifts into poetry, and it is in this outpouring of poetry, through the clear surface of prose, that shows us, and makes us feel, in its truest form, the force that moves us towards justice, and I believe that prose serves this purpose = to show us clearly the love that moves us towards intellect. I personally have this philosophy in my own writing.
I didn't like the 100% germanic tolkien changes... It was way better as the original - so no improvement. The changes to the rothfuss one i feel made it mostly better, i liked the changes more. I agree the sanderson changes were weird and some of the changes sounded better but not all of them. Most of the paragraph was better in its original state in my opinion.
I can't stand when people confuse objective quality with subjective taste. Your ability to enjoy something is subjective. The quality of the quality of the thing itself is objective. Another thing people need to understand in this regard is that our ability to enjoy something is a developed ability, not unlike a skill. I have no doubt that there are plenty of people in the world who enjoy McDonalds more than they enjoy, say, a really good steakhouse. If, however, you think McDonalds is just as "good" quality as the steakhouse, you're kind of an idiot. Further, you don't have to validate your subjective ability to enjoy something, by insisting that the thing you enjoy is just as objectively good as things which are enjoyed by other people. If you feel that need, it is evidence of an inferiority complex. It means you feel threatened by the idea that someone else might have better developed taste than you. Lastly, people often think that having good taste or recognizing that such a thing exists is snobbish. What real snobbery ACTUALLY is, is not in liking something good because it is good, but rather to be SEEN to like something good, because it makes you feel superior. A person with good taste likes good things for their own sake. A snob wants to appear to like good things, because it gives them respect, or makes them feel superior. Notice that for the snob, the thing itself almost doesn't even enter in to it. The perception of others matters more than the quality of the thing. As such, if something is regarded by the 'elite' as being good, snobs will like it whether it is good or not. Likewise, if something is regarded as being low, snobs will dislike it whether it is good or not. In fact, snobbery requires a sharp delineation between groups, so being seen to dislike the right things is just as important as being seen to like the right things, maybe even more important. This incidentally is the explanation for things like wine tasters being able to be fooled into voting cheap wine as the best, because it was highly praised before they tasted it, and so on.
This gets obfuscated by the fact that most people are literate in the modern world, so most of us can meet a basic standard of writing. If we were talking about an art form that most people don't have any minimum competence at doing--sculpture, for example--we would immediately realize that there is an OBJECTIVE quality that makes some works just technically better than others. It's undeniable that Michelangelo was a better sculptor than a random child mashing Play-Doh--it isn't a matter of taste.
It seems to me that the main difference between Germanic and Latinate words in English is not so much a question of how poetic they sound, but rather how modern. If you're writing stories about dragons and wizards, modernity can quickly feel anachronistic. It can break the spell (pun intended). Jeopardize your suspension of disbelief. I think that's why people dislike Sanderson. If it feels like your neighbor from Albuquerque who works at Baskin-Robbins is telling you the story… On the other hand, if a text feels too old timey, that can be alienating also. It can become difficult to relate. It is a balancing act, for sure, but one that has more to do with Chronos than with Calliope, if you ask me.
