Good Plain English: The problem with writing manuals

Likewise. I also found the title ambiguous, and the style of the piece itself an exemplar of much it rails against. Verbose, excessivly so, and somewhat over-endeared with itself.

I think it was critical of the language style guide's language style outside of its criticisms of classics, but then somehow finds the real issue is the meaninglessness of words in the common-folk language of Trump compared to the eloquent (yet also straight-forward) language style Obama.

In other words, I'm confused too.

ok, I'll start.

I think the article starts on its best point, and then never comes back to it. There is less editorial process than there used to be. It's not inconsistent to fail to adhere to your own style if one of the methods that you use to adhere to your own style is an editor.

Writing communicatively is hard, but testing whether your writing is communicative is easy, just have someone (else) try to read it, and tell you if they found it convincing.

Why did the author not come back to this? It seems like it should be the point of the article.

Also, JFYI, Umberto Eco's Rules for writing (well):

http://gioclairval.blogspot.it/2010/02/umberto-ecos-rules-fo...