Feb 10– From Letters on England by Voltaire (1733)

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Feb 10– From Letters on England by Voltaire (1733)

Summary: Voltaire thinks the English are smart.

Comments: The breaks are weird here. We pick up most of the way through one letter, finish it, read the whole next one, and then the first halfish of another. All told, the three only come out to about 10 pages, so I've included the full text and marked the official starts and ends. Kind of neat that these were originally published in English, and only translated to French later (Voltaire was fluent in both, as well as Spanish and Italian, as well as some knowledge of at least Latin). 

I think the most interesting take away here is the slightly awkward phrasing that he uses. Most of the paragraphs are very short, and start with a very straight forward topic sentence. While the thinking is deeper, the style is very middle-schooler-learning-to-write-an-essay. In some ways, Mallory was kind of similar, which makes me wonder if that's just a typical French style. I tried to do a little research, but didn't find anything enlightening. In English writing, I feel like there's a constant pendulum movement between very wordy and as terse as possible. A lot of 19th century authors (Dickens or Twain for example) feel like they would never use one word when they could use three or four. For much of the 20th century, as short and unembellished as possible seemed to be the goal. As the once near-canonical Strunk and White said, "omit needless words." We seem to be moving back towards wordy, based on both my reading, and what I'm hearing from professors I've talked to. A lot of people complain about ChatGPT and other LLM AIs being overly wordy, but I think they're just reflecting the current style. It'd be interesting to see 3 or 4 versions trained on text sets of 50 years or so. While you'd obviously get different language, I wonder if you could look at stats like sentence length (or response length) in general. 

In the second letter (on drama) the paragraphs got longer (slightly above average overall), but it feels out of place with how short they are in the first. Then the third one sort of alternates long and short.