Dense style can be found in a lot of pre-LLM writing. It is not necessarily bad, I have grown to treat it as a reflection of author’s ways of thinking. What makes or breaks it is whether it’s truly dense, whether it delivers the point precisely or words can be omitted (in which case it’s bad writing).
McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary is notable not only because it is often dense (in a good way), but also since it talks at length about different ways of attending to reality, among which there is no “correct” one, and where a particular way (even if seemingly objective) would bias our understanding of reality and inform further techniques we use to work with it, and how humanity has been lately drifting towards an extreme of one particular way of attending to the world. Similarities end quickly, though, the book offers a much deeper and more rigorous take.
The difference with dense writing produced by LLMs is that it tends to contain inconsistencies and errors if you re-read closely. I personally regularly have to, since a long and dense sentence may not always click right away. In a densely written book I inevitably find that it is I who didn’t parse it right, but with LLM-generated writing it turns out I was fed garbage in the first place.
McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary is notable not only because it is often dense (in a good way), but also since it talks at length about different ways of attending to reality, among which there is no “correct” one, and where a particular way (even if seemingly objective) would bias our understanding of reality and inform further techniques we use to work with it, and how humanity has been lately drifting towards an extreme of one particular way of attending to the world. Similarities end quickly, though, the book offers a much deeper and more rigorous take.
The difference with dense writing produced by LLMs is that it tends to contain inconsistencies and errors if you re-read closely. I personally regularly have to, since a long and dense sentence may not always click right away. In a densely written book I inevitably find that it is I who didn’t parse it right, but with LLM-generated writing it turns out I was fed garbage in the first place.