I think there is plenty of good and great writing that isn't timeless. Especially when it comes to essays, where the nature of what we know and care about changes so dramatically. An essay written to convince a slaver of the moral errors of slavery may seem so obvious to the modern reader as to be condescending, but, effective in it's time period, it was great writing.

True the content of the stories fade in and out of relevance and greatness.

The structuring of essays improves and dips in transcendent quality over time depending on the behaviour of authors at large and human understanding of communication through essay. The virtue and successful execution of well structured essays is timeless. RD's work is well structured. It's possible to learn and execute on structures that are proven to work across time and speak for themselves in the results.

> When did using "+" instead of "&" become acceptable in proper English? I understand this is a tech blog and I have no problem with "+" used in a tech context, the use in a virtue signalling piece on the rules of writing a good essay seems misplaced.

Could be that tech bias. I've been coding awhile, and '+' reads as 'ADD', for inclusion, while '&' reads as 'logical AND', for restrictive subsetting. The '&' no longer sits right. (Plus, it's a shell and HTML metacharacter, thus it's a potential potent piece of trouble in casual typing and so something to be avoided.)

I had to go back and search for the "+"es, but I think they're well suited to the context.

> I believe the formula I've given you, importance + novelty + correctness + strength, is the recipe for a good essay.

I wouldn't say he's really using "+" instead of "&". "importance & novelty & correctness & strength" doesn't provide the same feeling of adding, of mixing, to get a formula.