Totally disagree with this point. Orwell explains how the exact opposite is true in his "Politics and the English Language." Vague writing requires only vague thought. Clear writing requires clear thought (as well as editing), and clear thought takes effort. As a writer, you might have to spend more time actually typing unclear and convoluted garbage, but you can basically turn off your brain and just start vomiting words onto the page. To do that asks much less of you than writing clearly does. (Classic example is the Pascal quote: "I apologize for the length of my letter. I didn't have time to write a shorter one.")
Man, sign me up. I would love to have a Facebook again if you removed the news feed, likes, alarm red notifications, and long comment threads about politics or whatever. Just a casual "hey let's catch up" and "here's how my last month / quarter went," oh yeah, I'm in.
1. Listen to Christopher Hitchens talk about the hate speech law proposed in Canada (particularly his rant about how this is a problem rooted in human nature, not something we can legislate away).
2. Read "Robert's Rules of Order." (Not the whole thing, just the beginning.) The problem of building consensus among diverse and differing parties has been considered at length, and we should be familiar with the historical approaches to the problem rather than starting from scratch.
3. Read "Digital Minimalism" or some other book about the attention economy so that you understand how many businesses (as well as dark money political groups) intentionally engineer their products to produce dramatic emotional responses to information (because they are more addictive and make it easier to sell ads or win votes).
Without appreciating the history of this problem, its roots in human nature, and the business and political incentives to prevent its solution, we aren't going to get anywhere.
Totally disagree with this point. Orwell explains how the exact opposite is true in his "Politics and the English Language." Vague writing requires only vague thought. Clear writing requires clear thought (as well as editing), and clear thought takes effort. As a writer, you might have to spend more time actually typing unclear and convoluted garbage, but you can basically turn off your brain and just start vomiting words onto the page. To do that asks much less of you than writing clearly does. (Classic example is the Pascal quote: "I apologize for the length of my letter. I didn't have time to write a shorter one.")