flâneur

Stop making excuses for unclear writing - by Daniel Muñoz

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Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. —George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” Is it good to write clearly? I would have thought that the answer is obviously yes, at least for analytical writing. Ambiguity is nice for poetry and crosswords, and obscurity works for mystics and ciphers. But if you’re giving arguments, your goal should be to make yourself understood. There is simply no way to do that without writing clearly. The audience should be able to understand—with a minimum of toil and guesswork—what your words mean and how your ideas fit together. And yet, some authors contend that there is nothing

Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. —George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” Is it good to write clearly? I would have thought that the answer is obviously yes, at least for analytical writing. Ambiguity…

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