Can you clarify what you mean by [rant on plainstyle and legalese]? I think I understand… but in all of my professional experience, the opposite has seemed to be the case. In my academic experience, being “too casual” has been something I’ve been urged to avoid, hence the “legalese” writing style. Experiences vary, of course, so I’m genuinely curious.
-Somebody you wouldn’t know
I make a fuss about good technical writing because I believe clarity of purpose, as communicated to the people who have to carry it out, is the primary differentiator between successful projects and failures. As it happens, the best writing style for communicating clearly and effectively is plain style, by definition:
It is a form of rhetoric which expresses a message very clearly to convey a direct meaning. The core values of the plain style in literature are “clarity, brevity and sincerity…”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_style_in_literature
The whole idea is that if you can explain an idea more plainly, you should. This puts more responsibility on the writer to be understood, rather than assuming the reader will put in unnecessary effort to comprehend complex ideas further complicated by complex language. The more people that are involved in a project and the more difficult the ideas, the more important it is to lower the amount of effort necessary for each reader to discern the meaning. This way everyone is working on the same project, with no ambiguity.
Assuming I’m right then, why would there be disagreement on this? Why would some people be recommending the “high” style of writing for project documents? It comes down to two differences between me and them: 1) They want to impress people with the official-ness of the project more than they want it to be plainly and clearly understood, because 2) they think impressing the sort of people who are impressed by legalese is more important to the project’s success than informing the sort of people who have to implement it what it’s actually supposed to be.
Now, I’m not one to throw out sales and marketing. I was in sales, I know it’s important to impress people. But I also learned in sales it’s more important to have a good product than good pitch, because a good product is easier to pitch. It’s easy to sell something you believe in. Hell, I’m selling you on plain style right now, for no reason except I believe in it.
The other reason for this difference is I’m an elitist: I don’t think people who are impressed by high-falutin’ talk are worth impressing. They don’t have as much influence as they appear to. It makes sense that they wouldn’t because, by definition, if they’re easily impressed then they’ll be impressed by one thing today and another thing tomorrow and never be moving in the same direction two days in a row.
In contrast, the people who prefer ideas and substance are worth impressing, and people like that prefer great ideas communicated in simple language. In the world of math this quality is referred to as “elegance”. When an idea is made profoundly simple, like the proof in Lockhart’s Lament, mathematicians call it an elegant proof. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll appeal to authority and just say that mathematicians are worth impressing.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
Aeoli Pera 
Ultimately depends on the audience and trust in the writer, I’d say.
If you’re writing for nitpicking hostile reviewers, you will often have to be legalistic and address all the nitpicky points or, well, get rejected. On the other hand, if you’re writing popular science, you’re expected to skip the messy details (“what, g is not the same all over the world?”).
Legalism or excessive complication can also be a result of endless reviews and notes that have to be accomodated. Various forms of death by editing are possible.
Second, a breezy, plain writer who is wrong or skips the interesting parts for clarity — who doesn’t know his subject, in short — is also problematic since it shows a lack of competence and can’t be trusted. The legalistic approach at least may show the writer considered all the cases, even if it’s tedious. Or it can be mere obfuscation, of course.
If you do know what you’re talking about, write plainly for maximum impact.
The trouble with writing to cover all cases is you end up writing fine print, which isn’t intended to be read and understood. The important thing is communicating the idea effectively to the intended audience, and sometimes that means using a simplified model and neglecting air resistance. If you tried writing enough caveats to please hostile critics, your writing would have to become as complicated as the known universe, and then no one would be happy (including the critics, who would have nothing to gripe about).
The decision about how much detail to include is a judgment call based on the audience. It depends on some details being more important than others. This is an area where business people are often superior to technical people: no one ever had to tell them that sometimes you include the details, and sometimes they aren’t important. Engineers are so used to having their advice ignored that they’ve forgotten how to judge the relative importance of things, so they just say everything is essential so their butts are covered when the project falls apart and kills somebody because the company was cutting costs. While that’s tragic and all, it doesn’t change the way you’d run a good project in a sane operating environment, which is to make many small judgment calls about what’s important and what is unimportant enough that it *should* be neglected.
I should have mentioned in the OP: the best example of this is the XKCD Thing Explainer. It should be a writing exercise for all undergraduates to explain big ideas in their fields using only the 1,000 most common words list. It’s very difficult but by the end you’d have a 20-year expert’s concrete grasp of the topic.
this aisalives motherfucker is a complete faggot. i think he has some form of mental deficiency that prevents him from not running 2 his bathroom all evening and consuming all the excrement in there.
what a fucking pussy.
I’m impressed that you were able to delay gratification on that rejoinder for three days, kudos.
i can do whatever i put my mind 2 most of the time. its obviously not easy but ive put myself through harder scenarios being impulsive so if i keep the same mentality 2 delaying gratification and reducing impulsivity anything is possible.
> It comes down to two differences between me and them: 1) They want to impress people with the official-ness of the project more than they want it to be plainly and clearly understood, because 2) they think impressing the sort of people who are impressed by legalese is more important to the project’s success than informing the sort of people who have to implement it what it’s actually supposed to be.
Disagree, you are no different than them. You are both trying to “impress people” – you with efficiency, them with protocol. Plain writing is hard – very hard, which is why technical writers can make a salary. But they put in a huge amount of effort into what you denigrate as “legalese” because of your specific personality type. And you are simply engaging in competition with them to convince your boss – whoever is paying you and working with you (and you have to work with and next to) – that your personality and communication styles are superior to theirs.
I very much fall on the “plain” side but I understand “neurotypical” (that’s like “cisgender”) people and know there is certainly no “moral” difference here, and while IQ/Q is obviously a real thing, there really are “different types of intelligence.”
In my experience it is not all that uncommon for aspies to never get past the narcissism stage of youth and think they really are “unique” or “different” or even “superior” (“rational, not emotional”) but they are in fact just typical, average people who might do better on math tests than others. The whole reason it’s hip and cool to be “on the spectrum” in California is because for women it’s a way to get status as a “victim” and for men it’s a way to get status as “intelligent, rational, stoic, moral.” Kind of kinky if you think about it – kinda dom/sub kind of thing. They should like kiss.
When it comes to moral issues – think the seven deadly sins – the “neurodivergent” are certainly no better than anyone else – lol. Come on.
Plain writing is probably harder for some people than “legalese” is for others, and the so-called “neurodivergent” may be the exception that proves the rule. They are really good at plain writing and absolutely terrible at any other kind.
You want the instruction manual, the 101 textbook, the auto schematics, and even the medium level stuff written “plain.” But sometimes there are concepts quite subtle and sometimes they can’t be explained fully with “plain language.”
Then there are truths simply so dangerous you cannot speak them plainly without following a quite often extremely subtle and complex protocol – and the “neurodivergent” do not have a particularly good reputation for being able to accomplish these tasks (except in prison where some neurodivergent narcissistic sociopaths do well.) A State Department run by aspies would be a farcical comedy like the 1977 farce Airplane and would last five years at best until they started a global nuclear holocaust.
> think they really are “unique” or “different” or even “superior” (“rational, not emotional”) but they are in fact just typical, average people who might do better on math tests than others
I get accused of this a lot despite being the internet’s third-most prominent mystical Neanderthal phrenologist (I have the certificate on my wall). Surely that at least qualifies me to be a post-rationalist.
Anyway, you made some good points in here but you could stand to be a bit more polite about it.
> Anyway, you made some good points in here but you could stand to be a bit more polite about it.
You yourself once wrote it’s difficult to tell when an aspie is making a joke. I’m assuming it’s a joke and lol.
Anyway the rant isn’t about you it’s really about the aspie I’ve had to deal with my whole life. The sperginess I can deal with it’s the narcissism I can’t stand.