2. Establish social/tribal register - which can be done in inclusive (welcoming) or exclusive (aggressive) ways.
I think elegant, beautiful English peaked in the 1950s. I have a small collection of books from that period about various topics. They're all written in an effortlessly understated and unaffected English style that seems to have vanished now.
George Orwell's essays have some of the same quality.
At the other extreme, academic arts literature can be particularly bad, because the wilder fringes of (e.g.) critical theory seem to have developed a cargo cult vocabulary that primarily exists for social signalling, not for communication - while, ironically, spending a lot of time discussing social signalling.
When it's so easy to hack together an academic paper generator [1][2] and no one is much the wiser, it's clear that communication is no longer the point.
1. Convey meaning
2. Establish social/tribal register - which can be done in inclusive (welcoming) or exclusive (aggressive) ways.
I think elegant, beautiful English peaked in the 1950s. I have a small collection of books from that period about various topics. They're all written in an effortlessly understated and unaffected English style that seems to have vanished now.
George Orwell's essays have some of the same quality.
At the other extreme, academic arts literature can be particularly bad, because the wilder fringes of (e.g.) critical theory seem to have developed a cargo cult vocabulary that primarily exists for social signalling, not for communication - while, ironically, spending a lot of time discussing social signalling.
When it's so easy to hack together an academic paper generator [1][2] and no one is much the wiser, it's clear that communication is no longer the point.
[1] http://bocktherobber.com/2010/05/post-modernism-generator/ [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2014/feb/26...