Interesting. Good. Like.
…okay, I’ll stop being cheeky. I’ll admit beforehand my personal disdain against the plain style, because it interferes on my analysis of the shift: for me, what people call “streamlined” and “easy to understand” is often (not always) “shallow”. Because, eventually, such pressure doesn’t trim off just the fat, but a good chunk of the meat too.
In other words, if you try to make your text too simple and approachable, it’ll become incomplete (missing info you removed) and/or inaccurate (as the clarifications necessary to avoid misleading the reader were removed). Those two things affect prose too, mind you, not just technical writing — for example, if you’re writing fiction “incomplete” being “flat characters, uninspiring universe, bland story”; and “inaccurate” means “sloppy story full of plot holes”
And I see this overall tendency to butcher the text in other languages too, not just English*. This hints for me the shift is more like a literary movement than a change in the “core” of the language.
*For Portuguese, Dalton Trevisan (may he rest in peace) comes to my mind; his books getting shorter and shorter, and losing appeal in the process.
Thank you for writing this: I have found that extremely simplified and chopped sentences are actually distracting and more difficult to follow once they become too atomized and short. It makes it hard to tell what the thesis is and what’s supporting material.
