A lot. Since the DeepState released Covid upon the world in order to remove Trump from office I've probably read over a thousand books. Four books a week is pretty typical. If it wasn't for Amazon Kindle Unlimited I wouldn't have been able to afford it and would likely have gone insane. Not that anyone would be able to tell. Insane is the normal isn't it?
Two things I've noticed while doing all that reading.
One: The quality has diminished...A LOT. In fact I saw a video of a guy bragging about it. I won't mention his name because I don't want to be sued but if you read a lot you likely know whom I'm writing about. He spoke of minimum viable product in writing books. I'd never heard of that so I looked it up. It turns out it's really a thing.
"Minimum viable product" is a term coined by Frank Robinson and popularized by Eric Ries, founder of the Lean Startup methodology. According to Ries, an MVP is the version of a new product that allows the team to gather the maximum amount of proven customer knowledge with the least amount of effort.
Damn! He'd taken Perfection is the enemy of Good Enough and weaponized it. (The guy in the video, not the one quoted) He claimed that his background was IT so I suppose that I shouldn't be surprised. For all the debatable good that IT has brought to use it's certainly brought a LOT of Bovine Excretion
Sturgeon's law (or Sturgeon's revelation) is an adage stating "ninety percent of everything is crap." The adage was coined by Theodore Sturgeon, an American science fiction author and critic.
It's Ironic that Theodore Sturgeon was a writer during the golden age of science fiction. He identified the 'problem' and yet, I hadn't really noticed that writing was so bad until recently. Upon reconsideration I'm thinking that Sturgeon's definition of crap in regard to writing was in the content. Bad ideas. The same old stuff in a different wrapper. No imagination. Space Opera is a western where the cowboys have rayguns... and stuff.
Yeah. I can see that. I tend to think that kind of 'crap' is in the eye of the beholder. Personally I think that one hundred percent of television is worse than crap. What I'm talking about is something else.
Two: (actually a subset of point one) Quality of writing, not the content but the grammar and syntax. (I'm not really sure what syntax means but it sounds cool so I'll use it anyway). I took, lemme see, four? Six? Maybe ten counting college? of English composition while I was young. I definitely don't adhere to all the rules when I write. In fact may times I break them on purpose. Today? Especially 'journalists!' It's not evident to me that they have the least clue.
But I digress.
Back in the day the thing was the 'run on sentence.' It wasn't approved of. Sentences were supposed to be elegant and 'short and sweet'. When the 'thought' was elucidated then another paragraph was begun.
Today? OMG. Where do I start. I read something 'in the news' and I wonder. Izzit a yuge run on sentence or is it a paragraph of only one sentence? They typically have a lot of comma's though. Instead of starting a new sentence the 'journalist' lays a comma down, inserts a thought, then drops another comma and continues. That's acceptable in moderation. NOTHING about today's leftist media is moderate. I haz no idea whey the right is called extreme. Perhaps it's projection?
Worse, in my opinion, are books that are written that are composed of nothing but single sentences. No paragraphs allowed. Even more exasperating is that the majority of those sentences are expository.
What's WORSE....
Penalty called for excessive pounding on the keybored.