[celesti]

Less is more. One also needs good words. Read Hemingway for curtness and directness. It is a more satisfying read than something sophisticated and belabored. Capturing the right note in the simplest melody is more catchy and powerful than a complex fugue or sermon. To be concise, one needs to appreciate the flexibility and multiple facets of "simple" words.

[BearfootCoder]

Words which serve no purpose have no place on the page. But purpose varies with context.

If you're writing a guide to a new API, or a functional specification, then it pays to be as direct as possible. But if you seek to engage or enrage, to persuade, to illustrate why something taken as good is unmitigated folly, or just give people a reason to come back and read more of your text, then you may need more than a long, drab procession of purely functional sentences.

There is more to eating (and cooking) than the simple absorption of nutrients, and there is more to reading (and writing) than the simple absorption of facts. Unadorned simplicity is not automatically good. I've never managed to get past the first chapter of any Hemingway novel. Hell, the only Hemingway short story I've finished is that one that's six words long. I'd rather read Charles Dickens than Richard Ford, any day of the week. Give me the baroque and the beautiful, not something that's been stamped out by a soulless writing machine.

[HDMI_Cable]

This debate over the "directness" of modern writing really seems to be unique to 21st century English. We have a very direct and prosal language and a culture which places efficiency above all else.

Neither is bad, but our writing style is really interesting.

[matgillard]

Used in everything from music to culinary art to high fashion, minimalism has taken on a life of its own. But what is behind this trend?

[celesti]

Great question. Perhaps a recoil from abundance and hedonism or maybe more simply a return to first principles and less dissertation-talk for daily events