Instant Comparisons

You can find two composers, or three, who have set the same poem to music. It is instant comparison time. This is a very basic framework that everyone knows from grammar school, the "compare and contrast." Almost everyone can do it, and it provides its own inherent organizational principle.

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A colleague pointed out to me once, and I can't remember the words so I am paraphrasing and reinterpreting a bit, that since I didn't use the clotted academic style people might not associate me with a certain type of scholar, those who are trying to be theoretically brilliant at all times. He meant it as a compliment. I've evolved so that I write in order to put across my ideas rather than to prove to others or myself that I am a smart guy. That clotted, jargon-filled academic style is designed to be authoritative and a bit forbidding. I don't dumb thing down (I hope) but I try to write with the precise degree of complexity needed to do justice to the complexity of the ideas, and absolutely nothing more. We have to write for people who think hermeneutic is a hard word. I have a big vocabulary, but I have to look up words too. I'll spring a big word on you once in a while, but it is for effect, and not automatic. It will be a tasty word like chthonic, not something pretentious.