Guide of plain English alternatives to the pompous words and phrases in writing

Whilst I appreciate the Plain English Campaign's originally stated mission to discourage the use of unnecessarily opaque terminology, I think this is straying from the mark a bit. There's nothing wrong with having a decent vocabulary, as long as you can make yourself understood.

Personally I find the 'Newspeak' habit of replacing huge swathes of vocabulary with one or two tired phrases to be a much more annoying trend. eg:

"reached out" --instead of 'wrote to', 'contacted', 'emailed', 'phoned', etc.

"awesome" --instead of 'good', 'fine', 'great', 'useful', 'helpful', 'thrilling', 'exciting'... or almost any adjective that expresses pleasure.

"super" --which, likewise, seems to be becoming the universal adjective to replace 'very', 'extremely', 'rather', 'quite', etc.

God help us. Of late, I've even seen a rise in people describing things as "super awesome"!

Featuring such mind-bogglingly difficult words like "advise", "consult", "depict", "desire" and "locate". Someone evidently neglected to read their Orwell when they were assigned it as required reading in school. And they do document review, to boot, evidently on a mission to suck all the color out of the English language.

How do they think people learn words other than by encountering them in the wild? Nobody reads a dictionary for fun. That's exactly how I learned words as a child. It's natural, and it's ok.

More broadly, I don't understand this modern trend of trying not to expose people to things they don't understand or leaving things unclear at times. Isn't that one of the small yet magical things in life? Coming across something unfamiliar? Whether mundane; a word you don't know, or maybe a subtle play on words that the reader only picks up on in a subsequent reading, a small reference that someone only gets later when consuming other media, or something more specialized, like a scene in a movie making reference to events the viewer hasn't seen. Getting answers through effort, piecing a mystery together yourself or filling narrative gaps with your imagination is, in my opinion, part of the core experience of consuming media and living.

I see translators struggle with these ideas, and there is a tension between camps on whether things like puns and references to local cultural understandings should be replaced with equivalent ones in the target language or translated verbatim at the risk of confusing the viewer/reader. Personally, I lean to the latter.

> your attention is drawn to—please see, please note

> participate—join in, take part

I salute the goal ("hereinafter" should not be a word in 2022), but this list is poorly considered and often just substitutes one regional construct for another. How is "take part" more clearly understood than "participate"? It's not.

When I worked at an international institution, we had a joke that for every 100 words in English, 40 of them were accepted International English. It's true that jargon and regionalisms are confusing and exclusive, and that you need to consider your audience before writing something like "the client directive constrains us to utilize the Befangennam algorithm", but the actual solution offered here is way off.