Introduction
Here’s a couple more; I’m considering changing the title of this series as it feels inaccurate to call them writing styles, but we’ll see.
The path of least resistance
This style of content takes the path of least resistance in one’s mind. It is intuitive, pleasant, and simple and designed to interact with as little of the brain as possible, except for triggering the brain’s reward centres either by itself or by the anticipation of it.
It is possible that, when reading content like this, one feels like their brain “turns off”. It may be possible that too much exposure may lead to the brain remaining powered off long after the content is no longer being consumed. Content like this is especially common on social media, often in the form of recognisable and familiar templates, soundbites, memes, and thought-terminating cliches.
It also encourages readers to ignore blatant contradictions and fact-checking, in part by providing readers with the feeling of having gained some kind of knowledge in an (objectively) unrealistically short amount of time. As invalidation of the gained knowledge would invoke negative feelings, readers are quick to shy away from and defend against any threats to the content, as if the emotional value is more important to them than the rewards of factual accuracy and truth. To them, how true something is depends on how good it makes them feel.
Readers who enjoy this content style also tend to be hostile towards things that force them to think: justifying content that is difficult to grasp as worthless, responding to any requests to rethink their position as personal insults, and treating anyone who attempts to slow down the conversation (or “good vibes”) as a heretic and beating them down.
In short, the goal is to use one’s brain as little as possible in order for the brain to remain in a near-permanent resting state (which is naturally desirable because it saves calories). Any action contrary to the goal is perceived as undesirable and hostile and groups will willingly expend energy in an attempt to silence any dissent, or just “blocking” the unwelcome content.
Everyone is a noun
This describes the tendency of some people to describe almost every attribute of themselves as a noun, perhaps as a way to identify with communities that may or may not yet exist. For example, instead of saying “I like cars”, these people give themselves nouns such as “car enjoyer”; instead of saying “I like to pet cats” they say “cat petter”.
Perhaps the sense of belonging that results from trying to “nounify” every aspect of oneself in order to obtain certain descriptive titles in communities and the respect they perhaps command outweighs either (or both) the close-minded stuffiness of restricting oneself to predefined nouns or the resulting lack of credibility from changing one’s identity all the time.
Younger people may be more predisposed to this idiosyncratic form of self-labelling with nouns (as opposed to the usual adjectival manner) as they’re still unfamiliar with the world and themselves (especially the knowledge that their preferences change over time no matter what their current emotions tell them), and are still in the process of developing their sense of identity and finding a place to belong in society.
That said, there are already plenty of generic appropriate nouns available to us such as “fan/fanatic”, “motorhead/gearhead”, or “animal lover”, so this recent wave of neologisms trying to replace everything with words like “enjoyer” gives off perhaps more than just a subtle hint of illiteracy. That said (again), language does evolve and the younger generation deciding they’re too cool for the normal, appropriate, perfectly fine words in dictionaries they never bothered to read is just one of the many ways we get new words over time, though I have reservations about their tenacity as I prefer it when languages evolve due to speakers having more, not less vocabulary.