{"id":12482,"date":"2008-02-06T08:27:14","date_gmt":"2008-02-06T13:27:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/?p=12482"},"modified":"2014-01-11T14:48:37","modified_gmt":"2014-01-11T19:48:37","slug":"thems-writin-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/2008\/02\/06\/thems-writin-words\/","title":{"rendered":"Them&#8217;s writin&#8217; words"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Somewhere on LiveJournal&#151;or maybe it was over on the <i>Asimov&#8217;s<\/i> board&#151;there was a recent thread about style versus substance, which contained the usual long debate about which of the two was more important.  I can no longer find where that conversation was going on, so I&#8217;ll just post here what I&#8217;ve always though of as the final word on the subject, from Ursula K. Le Guin&#8217;s classic 1973 essay &#8220;From Elfland to Poughkeepsie&#8221;:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>Many readers, many critics, and most editors speak of style as if it were an ingredient of a book, like sugar in a cake, or something added onto the book, like the frosting on the cake. The style, of course, <\/i>is<i> the book. If you remove the cake, all you have left is the recipe. If you remove the style, all you have left is the synopsis of the plot.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Somewhere on LiveJournal&#151;or maybe it was over on the Asimov&#8217;s board&#151;there was a recent thread about style versus substance, which contained the usual long debate about which of the two was more important. I can no longer find where that conversation was going on, so I&#8217;ll just post here what I&#8217;ve always though of as [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[404],"class_list":["post-12482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-ursula-k-le-guin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12482"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12482\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12484,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12482\/revisions\/12484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}