There is a sad fact: We lost the ancient art of a proper language usage.
Due to the blogs, and especially social media, really crappy written language is everywhere.
It seems like unimportant, until we realize that people of the past have bootstrapped themeselves on mostly good, end sometimes even exceptionally good books, including poetry.
The quality of writing reflects the “quality” of thought, so, slowly but steadily, good writing trains the mind to be more accurate and disciplined in how it thinks and speaks.
Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.
– Edsger Dijkstra
Ancient languages
It is a universal cultural phenomena and a common practice that different social groups are using an excessively elaborate language to signal that they belong to either an “upper class” or to an “educated” class.
Not just that, but some languages (Sanskrit, lets say) have been evolved to be “languages of a high society”, to be clearly distinguished form a “common folks speak”, and almost every language has a pompous “high-society form”.
The irony, however, in that the ancient “common folk speak” are superior in any way (being less convoluted, verbose, less overloaded and thus “closer to reality”).
Some language cultures even emphasize omission of unnecessary, redundant words, when the meaning is clear from the current social context. Idiots and Chuds would claim that this is “primitive”, while it is actually just right.
Last but not least, the Buddhas teaching has been written in an intentionally highly repetitive stile, but without any verbosity or “cleverness”, which in part reflects how a languge has been used back then.
Autistic speech
Not surprisingly, most of autistic people have a very similar style of language usage - minimalist, often omitting redundant and decorative parts, direct and straightforward.
There is, however, a catch. Most of Himalayan communities, which speak some local dialect of the Tibetan language, would have exactly the same style. Moreover, verbosity would considered to be a silly vice, a misuse of a language, just as overly-sensual or emotional behavior as a misuse of the Mind.
What Chuds and degens label as autism is partially an ancient way of using the Mind and a human language (wich, of course, is an evolved set of habits which reflect a rather “bare and harsh” but very “well-known, well-understood” and “logical” habitat).
No downsides
The purpose of each uttered (or written down) sentence has to be only its meaning, without any superficial cleverness and, especially any form of a virtue signalling, which is, indeed, a “cancer”.
There is literally no downsides is stripping the use of a language to a disciplined bare minimum, when everything is to serve a single purpose - to communicate the intended meaning as clearly as possible using less, but just right words.
“Saving the words” is just a “natural” economy, like saving any kind of resources. Reducing a cognitive load is an optimization, which is as important as reducing any kind of a unnecessary burden.
The ancients knew this. It is as natural as being part of their economies.
The heuristics
The heuristics are actually simple and straightforward and go back to the basic language textbooks for first graders.
One has to take a great care of producing a clear structure of a sentence (subject, verb, object, you know) in a proper (established) order.
All the unnecessary, redundant, decorative words has to be omitted. Superficial “cleverness” and especially “virtue signalling” has to be avoided.
The shorter - the better (assuming the beaning has been clearly communicated in the structure of a sentence).
Poetry
The effort and the care has to be the same as when great poets choose their words. Words has to be well-chosen.
It is perfectly normal (and even required) to spend lots of time choosing one’s words and to rewrite the sentences many times, until nothing can be more simplified, streamlined or taken out.
A disciplined mind often produce sentences which do not require much rewriting, but this takes decades of development and practice.
Mathematics
Mathematicians went as far as evolving generalized notations in order to eliminate verbosity and ambiguity, so much that one has to learn to expand it and extract the meaing.
The most wonderful part is that it the universals has been caputed, like fishes in a net. Groupping with parenthesis captured the universality of an order (or operations), the infix binary operators captured an implicit commutativity (whenever it manifests itself), which is the notion of a relativity of a point of view and of a symmetry.
We, programmers, have to understand the power of a proper notation, and in the classic Functional languages, which were based on maths.
One more time
The only meaning of a verbalized communication (oral or written) is to transmit and convey the indented meaning.
The early pioneers of a grossly misnamed and grossly misunderstood subfield of NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming, but it is not Neuro and not Programming), which has been ruined by Chuds (like everything which is good and true) got this right.
There are so-called deep-structure somehow represented within our brains, and a surface-structure with which we manged to came up for a verbalized transmission (which is usually inadequate and ad-hooc).
The processes of “encoding” of the intended meaning (by you) and then of “decoding” and “reconstructing” of it by the recipient (a listener or a reader) deludes and distorts one’s inner representation of reality, given that we have no evolved defences against misuse of the langauge (lies, deception or just bullshit).
So, the art of using a spoken and written language is not optional but necessary, and it is NOT in excessive verbiage with “long words” and catchy memes being woven in, and, obviously, not in the endless torrents of a verbalized dihharea that Chuds usually emit to signal their self-proclaimed “virtue”.
Examples
There are some examples of an exceptionally good writing stile.
It is important to note that exceptionally good fiction writers, like Herman Hesse or Hemingway, often “naturally” shifted to a similar style in their best parts. The relation between clarity and a deep understanding in very real.
Graham Hutton
This is the best visual example of an exceptionally good writing I could think of:
https://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~pszgmh/popl.pdf
Notice that these are hand-written notes, so he does not use different fonts (like italic), and just underline the words instead. In to primary school we have been taught to identify and make explicit a semantic structure within a sentence by underlying the key nouns or verbs All the sentences are simple, short, and convey a single well-defined meaning.
His books have also been written in a similar style.
Barbara Liskov
Another canonical example are the books by Barbara Liskov. She is a master of short and clear explanations, which require proper references to the related concepts, that comes only from a deep understanding of the subject.
The publishing industry fucked it all
As long as publishers optimize of more pages per book with a catchy title on a last hot meme topic, we all are fucked. Just as the Internet regressed into a garbage dump of unnecessary, redundant meaningless information (we have to parse and process), so were our books, which used to be associated with knowledge and even “wisdom”.
Read the old CS books (before the C++ and Java eras, just before 2000s) to see the difference in style and meaning.