David Foster Wallace on "Prior To"

Taken from LAWPROSE.org
"Bryan Garner routinely interviews judges and others on the art of writing. LawProse maintains a one-of-a-kind video archive of these educational interviews. These are excerpts from some interviews."

• Category

  News & Politics

[wmotiger]

You sure wouldn't know this was his opinion from reading Infinite Jest.

[Shawnruss]

At this time I'm enjoying this video, prior to that I was not.

[blackacidlizzard]

"the downside of starting to pay attention"

A fitting epitaph for many a man broken by this world.

[destybenway]

What do you mean by that?

[alsvid shaggy]

he wasn't saying don't use polysyllabic words. He was saying use as few syllables as necessary. One seven syllable word is better than 12 one syllable words.

[TheEccentricHippie]

The one thing that has always confused me about DFW is that his writing style seems to directly contradict his opinions in real life.

[Hanah Bae]

Sorry, I'm just appreciating how much you use use in this comment.

[Jeffrey White]

It's important to note that he is speaking in the context of legal writing—the interview is from lawprose.org. So he's probably talking about that bureaucratic jargon in political bills and laws, as well as the nonsensical fine print you see at the bottom of things. That, I think he's saying, could be simplified.

[Jeffrey White]

Excluding the fact that he was a recovered addict and attended AA/NA meetings his entire adult life.

[brandon cadran]

is it nice to use an alternative though? I mean what you are saying goes completely against what David Foster Wallace is trying to get at. Why use a bigger word when use would be perfectly fine. If you feel that you are going to overuse the word use, then utilize makes no difference. They are the same word just spelled differently. So using the word utilize would only add to your overuse of words pertaining to the "employment of something for a particular purpose."

[brandon cadran]

It does seem to be a big unknown word, but his argument in this video is not to use more or larger words than you have to. Formicating is only one word. One word saves me much more time than if he said, crawling sensation on his skin from ants crawling up and down his arm

[brandon cadran]

Well through deriving the morphemes from the word formicating it would in an extremely technical sense, from its latin/greek roots, mean "bits moving forward". Bits could also be replaced by "small things", "crumbs", "grains".

Formicating is presently used to describe a crawling sensation on the skin. In the passage there isn't actually ants on his skin, it's imagined. If he said crawling it wouldn't have been as vivid. Formicating is the most accurate word for the imagination of ants on the arm