English is a creole language, a mix of Saxon and Latin – “The multitudinous seas incarnadine / Making the green one red” – with some foreign spices added (goulash, ketchup). Plain English mostly means Saxon English, and the words tend to be shorter and punchier. They can be overused – just not in the mscripts I am used to handling. Academic writers tend to let their erudition get in the way of clarity, with the result that a lot of the clarifying a CE does involves simplifying the language just enough to let a sentence’s content slip through with minimal interference. That often means swapping in Saxon words when the author is relying too heavily on Latin ones. The cadence of a sentence matters a great deal, and so does the way it sounds (when a sentence is well constructed, you can almost hear it). I refer back to the mile-long nature of mscripts. Well-constructed sentences let a reader amble down them without backtracking or jarring switchbacks.
Good writing is always moving forward toward an endpoint, sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph. It doesn’t have to tell a story, but it has to move forward in some way. It has to have a pulse. The next sentence needs to have some inevitability about it, based on all the preceding ones.
ADDENDUM: Apostrophes
There was a bunfight this week in the New York Times over apostrophes. Specifically, about whether it’s Harris’ or Harris’s, Moses’ or Moses’s, Plautus’ or Plautus’s. Really, I thought that one had been settled: at this desk, which I think aligns with most desks, it’s Harris’s, Moses’s, and Plautus’s. Apparently it isn’t so simple, but that’s English for you – stare at it long enough and the universe starts to go grey. In a Web search on this matter, what struck me was how many different arguments marshalled themselves on either side. I found that many commentators pointed to pronunciation and suggested that it be your guide – “You say Harris’s, not Harris’, so add the extra s.” Which would mean that Moses’ wouldn’t get the extra s, presumably because the finally s in Moses is soft. Of course, that would mean that you get awkward results like Moses’ (soft s) but Jesus’s (hard s), Morris’s but Humphries’. With matters like this, I tend to look for the simplest possible rule that requires the fewest possible exceptions and stick with it. So, what is the simplest possible rule? Always add the s after the apostrophe in a possessive.