[Veen]

You are not the only one. It's irritating to read. Complexity and nuance are sacrificed because the writer values concision over truthfulness.

You can see the problem in the first two sentences of the article:

"To write well is to think clearly.

If you can think clearly, you can find something worth saying."

These are pleasant aphoristic paragragraphs, but what they say is not actually true. They gesture towards something true, but the drive to simplicity has turned potentially interesting points into falsehoods.

And the next sentence is both false and damaging. Good writing is most definitely not "therapy that you publish for the world to learn from".

(Plus, the writer should give balanced sentences a rest. They're useful to have in the rhetorical toolbox, but quickly become tedious when overused.)

[mybandisbetter]

There's another problem with being obsessed with concision: it's more compatible with simple ideas than nuanced ideas. I work at a place where I'm required to explain urban planning issues while using the simplest-possible subjects in all sentences. So, I can write, "Transit improves traffic," but I can't write, "To the extent that transit enables residents to reach destinations more efficiently than driving, a greater number of proportion of people can travel without worsening traffic." This isn't a great example because I'm sure there's a simpler way to write my second sentence. The pattern I've noticed, however, is that I often need to be intellectually dishonest to write simple sentences with simple subjects, because they make the world seem simpler than it is. A complex world — full of gradations and marginal costs — often requires complex sentences.

[bonoboTP]

My take:

<subheading>Transit improves traffic</subheading>

When many people travel on the road as a unit - in a bus for example - traffic flow improves compared to everyone driving their own car and thus travelling as separate units of traffic. Most of the bad stuff we dislike about traffic results from "friction" and interaction: yielding at intersections, the gaps between vehicles following each other, being slow to react on green light, and so on. But traffic won't automatically improve with more transit. It needs to be planned such that ...

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In your long version (which you admit can be improved) I dislike the fancy, prestige words of "residents", "destination", "greater number or proportion of people" can just be "more people". I find that good, world-renowned experts are not afraid to write in simple words but still give deep insights into special topics. I find that the less pretentious and shorter the words are in an academic paper, the more likely it is to come from a top research group or top researcher.

[Veen]

I find the same when I write about technical topics for a non-technical audience. I write sentences that aren't quite true, because the truth is more complex than the reader cares about or would understand without additional background.

I've learned to live with it, because the alternatives are to i) write a book instead of a memo or article or ii) weigh sentences down with hedges, caveats, and qualifications that don't help the reader anyway.

[OskarS]

I tried reading some of the later articles in the series, and they're exhausting! All the writing has this incredibly tiring staccato rhythm, and the articles are just gigantic dumps of bullet points and headers. It's like having being machine-gunned with marketing platitudes and writing truisms.