I think the way I define it is...the writer gets so lost in writing (you're absolutely right, often totally pretentious) "pretty sentences" that they lose sight of what they're actually trying to convey, and the characters that they are writing about lose any character because they're put on the back burner. Gah. Does that make sense? I'm not so sure... I love beautiful language, I love it a lot, but only when it's used right, not when it's done for its own sake alone.

I'm not sure this is any better...damn.