Why Is My Prose So Annoying?

Sometime in the past couple of years, my writing began to look sort of weird. Mostly my nonfiction writing. I don't know exactly when it crossed this line; all I know is that I've been writing various emails to professors, personal essays, school papers, the two music posts you see on this site, and so on, and the more I look over what I wrote one question forms in my mind:

"Jesus, why is my prose style so annoying?"

I mean you've noticed it, right reader? It's okay, you can tell me. (I know nobody's actually reading this, but anyways...) It's long winded, there's a ton of subordination and modifiers and such weighing each sentence down (not to mention semicolons, which I guess I have a fetish for), there's a virulent strain of what I'll call "stock theory" where five cent words and concepts cribbed from theoretical texts are thrown around haphazardly...it's just a mess.

To be fair, my prose has always been sort of sloppy. Back in high school I was one of those kids who really, really loved David Foster Wallace and took every opportunity to imitate his writing style. Now that was probably annoying in its own way, but for all the hoopla about how long-winded and pedantic and irritating DFW's writing can be, especially in his fiction, I think by-and-large his prose had a verve and energy to it that carried you through to the end of his very long sentences. He was, after all, a self-proclaimed Grammar Nazi, one who wrote a really long philosophical essay on semantics and syntax and the ethics of grammatical correctness; the choice to write in that style was always a calculated one, and he had the uncanny ability to appear glib and informal even when he was employing words like "prolegomenous." If my prose had any of those merits back then, you can thank him for that, not me. But my prose now is different, and not in a good way: it's leaden, clumsy, pretentious, and overall just a real slog to get through.

Anyways, I could talk for hours about all this, including where my new prose style came from (read: it's theory and Fredric Jameson in particular—FJ is, for the record, a great prose stylist despite what haters will tell you, but he's also really hard to imitate unless you think the same way he does—and that is doubly true if you're imitating him unconsciously, as I think I am). But the reason why it bothers me so much is that I think it cuts against the grain of what the alt internet is supposed to be. I mean, obviously everybody including me should do and write what they want, however they want; if I or anybody else wants to write their blog in a facsimile of academic prose, then they should be free to do so. And a lot of the bloggers I read most voraciously—K-Punk obviously but also The Pinocchio Theory and An und für sich and McMansion Hell—are academics, or academic-adjacent folks whose prose retains traces of that milieu. But it's hard to shake the feeling that this writing style is just me writing the way I think I should—as an educated and somewhat politically-aware person—rather than being truly loose and free and informal. For chrissakes, this is a site whose name is a riff on a Planescape: Torment location and who has as its mascot a side character from an erotic visual novel; why write like I'm trying to get published in the London Review of Books?

I knew that making this blog would be a source of writing practice, but I think I misunderstood the nature of the practice a blog gives you. It's not so much writing quality—though it can offer that too—as it is writing as a habit: learning to create prose that feels natural and unfussy and relaxed and clear, writing just to write. Which means, obviously, that the actual quality of writing is more or less besides the point.

So here is my pledge to you, dear-and-likely-nonexistent-reader: all posts from here on out will be at least 50% less annoying to read. You have my word.