"On the evening of March 8, we invalidated all authenticated sessions on GitHub.com created prior to 12:03 UTC on March 8 out of an abundance of caution to protect users from an extremely rare, but potentially serious, security vulnerability affecting a very small number of GitHub.com sessions."

"out of an abundance of caution" adds nothing other than the faint smell of a desperate attempt to reassure the reader. The sentence would read much better without it.

I'm all for rich language where it's useful or appropriate (a novel, etc) but in most cases I just want to know what's up.

[0] https://github.blog/2021-03-08-github-security-update-a-bug-...

"On the evening of March 8, we logged out all users from GitHub.com who had logged in prior to 12:03 UTC on March 8. This was done to protect users from an extremely rare, but potentially serious, security vulnerability affecting a very small number of GitHub.com sessions. No user accounts were affected"

I really couldn't simplify much without losing information. Logging out users isn't the same as invalidation of authenticated sessions because this probably revoked access to bots / API calls etc.

Last night, we logged out your Github account to fix a security flaw. Your account was not breached. You can read more details here [1].

[1] https://github.blog/2021-03-08-github-security-update-a-bug-...

"On the evening of March 8, we invalidated all authenticated sessions on GitHub.com created prior to 12:03 UTC on March 8 out of an abundance of caution to protect users from an extremely rare, but potentially serious, security vulnerability affecting a very small number of GitHub.com sessions."

"Out of an abundance of caution" adds only the smell of a desperate attempt to reassure the reader. The sentence would be much better without it.

I like rich language where it is useful or fitting but, usually, I only want to know what the writer is communicating.

Hmm. You may be right.

like this:

> Hmm. You may be right.

thats all i ask

Mandarin was the official language of the government, and so all regional and local bureaucracies, during the days of dynasties in China. Although it may sound foreign to locals in various provinces, it guaranteed that every part of the government had a common understanding.

Quite the opposite of fluff for fluff's sake.

Most writing on the web (including most of my work) is designed for reach, for all of the narcissistic reasons like retweets and shares, but also the reason that we live in a more democratic world today, and ideas that have more reach often have more impact.

When you write, you want yourself to succeed through your writing, but to me it's far more important that my ideas succeed - that they find life in another mind.

Early writing (especially from the era you mentioned, alongside the vedas and the upanishads before it) was poetic not only for the purpose of aesthetics, but also so that the work can self-select who can understand it. Interpreters and translators were common (and still are when concerning these and religious works), which concentrates power. If I need you to tell me what the mahabharata says, you have more power than if I could understand it myself.

Overall, pulling to either extreme - simplicity or purple prose - is not recommended, but I think everyday writing (especially policy) should be clearer and not cleverer.

Otherwise, sure, I agree. I'd just say that the beauty of democratization and widespread literacy is that we all have access to the high culture of the past.

PG does not really explore that (natch), but that's a point to consider, nonetheless.

There is certainly no reason why one can't write well and communicate their ideas at the same time. In fact, I'd argue that well-written ideas spread more quickly. Things like The Bible or The Qur'an would likely be far less influential if they were poorly written.

> It's too much to hope that writing could ever be pure ideas. You might not even want it to be. But for most writers, most of the time, that's the goal to aim for. The gap between most writing and pure ideas is not filled with poetry.

I think that's virtually meaningless unless you define what is meant by "an idea". The Bible, Qu'ran, the story of Gilgamesh, Homer's Illias,... are all ideas, just the same as famous essays by Hemingway or Benjamin Franklin. Even Proust's In Search of Lost Time with it's epic long sentences is a multitude of ideas regarding involuntary memory, separation anxiety and much more.

Everything PG writes after that hinges on a single imperative: That if you intend for your writing to be read, you must write simple.

The trouble is that his argument doesn't challenge that. There's no reflection on the fact that this is by far an universal principle, or that it, paradoxically, defines the relationship with the reader as if the latter always wants simple, digestible reading at every turn.

Hemingway is famous for his terse and simple writing, attributed to his schooling as a journalist. But he also had a critics who simply despised his literary writing for its terse and uncompromising style. And then there's William Faulkner who had this baroque style with long, endless sentences which dug their heels into Big Emotions, trying to convey them in the most sinuous way possible. Faulkner, just like Hemingway having won the Nobel Prize, found himself the butt of criticism on his writing as well.

Sure, these musings pertain to great literators. PG's point could be relegated to articles and essays instead. Or, unspoken yet more to the point, writing as this ephemeral, intangible idea that disolves and dissappear like vapor clouds the second it is published in the digital realm. Unlike words which are printed in respectable paper journals and glossy magazines.

No, the writing style of PG's essay was also part of this expose. Leveraged by the author to drive a point home. I'm still not sure what that point was exactly. PG being PG, chances are he just wanted nothing more then to make a so-called thought-provoking statement. In that regard, simple writing doesn't automatically make for good writing. The idea, the essence, you're trying to sell still needs to be solid and worth telling. That's where PG's essay, ironically, falls flat.

PG's essay doesn't spark a debate because he writes about an idea, it sparks discussion because of quite the opposite: writing about anything except about writing or why one writes. Now, one can fault PG for not providing context, but as with anything in this digital world, PG publishes on his own websites and assumes that the reader had written his other writings as well to understand what he's trying to get at. That's fine. It just doesn't make for compelling reading if one has to pieces together.

"Beauty" and "inspiration" are subjective and vary with personal preferences. I find simple and concise language much more elegant than the verbose "literary" styles of the past.

That actually isn't universally true. For example, most people today probably consider Shakespeare's writing style to be "flamboyant" yet his audience was a wide swath of the public. The difference today is that we are post-Moderns and so we have inherited the Modernist rejection of the Victorian era and its excessive tendencies.

Akbar was also a contemporary of Shakespeare, interestingly enough.

Is this true? Since the 20th century, there's been a marked subset of literature dedicated toward ambiguity, absurdism, and surrealism brought on by the idea of the subconscious, the theory of relativity, WWII.

In fact, most of these titles arguably don't even have an "intended idea" to impart. E.g. T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland", Joyce's "Ulysses", Camus's "The Stranger" to name a couple off the top of my head.

"'Beauty and 'inspiration' are subjective...I find simple...language much more elegant than...'literary' styles of the past" Sure, in your subjective opinion you think older literature is not as pleasing to read, but these works objectively changed the use of the English language: that's why they are regarded as literature.

Canonical literature changed not only the way future authors wrote, but also how future generations behold and conceive existence. Both the ideas, and the way they are expressed are the source of many derivative bodies of text including your and my own comments.

Modern works that repackage these ideas, styles, and archetypes in a more diluted way to satisfy one's personal taste and level of reading comprehension does not qualify them to be more "literary" than the original works which created those artifacts. In this sense, the idea of literature and the value of those works is well defined. To reduce literature as merely "verbose" and to quote the word as if it is illegitimate and lacking consensus is highly ignorant and, given the lack of substantive evidence or original arguments supporting it, completely asinine.

Don’t speak clearly or concisely or with prose or with poetry, if you lack conviction. Who the fuck are you talking to, take your stand. The world is not your school.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Lan...

But hey, if he meant ‘this ones for the kids’, make it clear by writing simply.

All forms of expression tread on fraud if you lack conviction, and you will have to hide in airy fortifications of [‘that’s not what I meant’, ‘I was misinterpreted’, ‘You only think I meant this’, ‘Your are the problem’].

Well I’m sorry, I was just trying to figure out what you simply meant to say.

I would argue that "writing" can mean "writing the tool" as well as "writing the art form." PG is talking about "writing the tool."

Confusingly, both the tool and the art form can convey ideas.

Certain ideas can be conveyed better by art ("a picture is worth a thousand words"). Visual art is typically more accessible than complex prose, but all forms of art can reach levels of inaccessibility that are frustrating to those not "in the know."

That's not the argument here. This talks about language and writing as a means of communicating ideas to as broad an audience as possible. There is still a place for dense, poetic, or ambiguous language full of jargon and metaphor and all that good stuff. For example, physicists will communicate amongst themselves in a very inaccessible language of physics because they need precise language in that setting. But a physicists who wants to communicate his ideas to the public, he will simplify it to to make it accessible.

Secondly implicit in that argument is the notion that ordinary people can only comprehend 'simple speech' and have no appreciation for form or aesthetics, which is pretty arrogant but par for the course for your average PG essay and captures perfectly the stereotypical software developer developer mindset of completely lacking appreciation for style and thinking one's own ideas are so brilliant they have to be dumbed down for everyone else.

Here's the context for my argument: believe it or not, there are people that will use language to impress or intimidate or to even mask their ignorance, even people who also purport to communicate ideas. Sometimes those people will also purposely use jargon with the aim to do both: direct their message to their in-group and purposely exclude individuals not from their in-group (I can list some examples of groups that do that, but I prefer not to go down that rabbit hole. I'm sure you can come up with some examples as well).

On the other hand, people who genuinely care about communicating ideas as broadly as possible will tailor their speech in such a way as to make it most accessible to as much of the audience as possible, because to them the idea is the important part not the medium. I leave it up to you to define 'accessible speech', but to pg it means communicating with simpler language - I think he makes a reasonable argument. Especially in context of a multicultural society with a sizable (recent) immigrant base and a global audience with various levels of English vocabulary knowledge.

It is also the hallmark of a good teacher when they can tailor the idea to a student who is smart enough to understand it but struggles with overcoming some kind of barrier (from vocabulary, to culture)