1. Classic style

    The guiding metaphor of classic style is seeing the world. The writer can see something that the reader has not yet noticed, and he orients the reader’s gaze so that she can see it for herself. The purpose of writing is presentation, and its motive is disinterested truth. It succeeds when it aligns language with the truth, the proof of success being clarity and simplicity.

    The truth can be known, and is not the same as the language that reveals it; prose is a window onto the world.

  2. Nominalization

    The English language provides bad writers with a dangerous weapon called nominalization: making something into a noun.

    Instead of affirming an idea, you effect its affirmation; rather than postponing something, you implement a postponement.

    "Comprehension checks were used as exclusion criteria” would be better said as “we excluded people who failed to understand the instructions.”

    “There is not any anticipation there will be a cancellation” would be better as “I don’t anticipate that I will have to cancel.”

    Zombie sounds, unlike the verbs whose bodies they snatched, can shamble around without subjects. That is what they have in common with the passive constructions that also bog down these examples.

  3. The curse of knowledge

    The better you know something, the less you remember about how hard it was to learn.

    The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose. It simply doesn’t occur to the writer that her readers don’t know what she knows - that they haven’t mastered the patois of her guild, can’t divine the missing steps that seem too obvious to mention, have no way to visualize a scene that to her is as clear as day. And so she doesn’t bother to explain the jargon, or spell out the logic, or supply the necessary detail.

    1. ​Such tortuous syntax​
  4. Structural parallelism

    If the new phrase has the same structure as the preceding one, its words can be slotted into the waiting tree, and the reader will absorb it effortlessly. The pattern is called structural parallelism, and it is one of the oldest tricks in the book for elegant (and often stirring) prose.

    “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters.”

    1. ​The principle of parallel construction​
  5. You live only once

    The logician would argue, You only live once should be rewritten as You live only once, with only next to the thing it qualifies, once.

    The logician would be unbearably pedantic, but there is a grain of good taste in the pedantry. Writing is often clearer and more elegant when a writer pushes an only or a not next to the thing that it quantifies. In 1962 John F. Kennedy declared, “We choose to go to the moon not because it is easy but because it is hard.” That sounds a lot classier than “We don’t choose to go to the moon because it is easy but because it is hard."

  6. Such tortuous syntax

    How does a writer manage to turn out such tortuous syntax? It happens when he shovels phrase after phrase onto the page in the order which each one occurs to him.

    The problem is that the order in which thoughts occur to the writer is different from the order in which they are easily discovered by a reader. It’s a syntactic version of the curse of knowledge. The writer can see the links among the concepts in his internal web of knowledge, and has forgotten that a reader needs to build an orderly tree to decipher them from his string of words.

    1. ​Who the fuck is Guy Debord?​
    2. ​The curse of knowledge​
    3. ​Choose a suitable design and hold to it​