Mark Tredinnick - The Little Red Writing Book-University of New South Wales Press (2006)

Shakespeare understood the genius of English.That’s why his works
endure. So did Jane Austen and the writers of the Bible. So do the
others here.
This is not to say that you can’t use words like ‘adumbrate’,
‘amplitude’, ‘transpire’, ‘apprehension’, ‘completion’, ‘acquire’,
‘disquisition’, ‘perception’, ‘recursive’ and even—aarghh!—
‘minimisation’ or ‘utilisation’, if each seems the best and most
economical word for what you want to say, or if they speak the
way you speak—or your character does. Just remember that there
are always alternatives in the common tongue for what you want
to say—specifically here ‘shadow forth’, ‘space’, ‘come to pass/
happen’,‘fear/misgiving/understanding’,‘end/finish/close’,‘buy’,
‘essay’,‘sense/sight’,‘repetitive’,‘limit’ and ‘use’. And if you favour
those, you’ll be writing English the way it wants to be written. ‘He
who uses many words of more than two syllables is running counter
to the genius of our mother tongue’, wrote Walter Murdoch in his
essay ‘Sesquipedalianism’ back in the 1930s.
But I don’t want you to get the wrong impression here. This is
not an argument that only the shortest words and only the shortest
sentences will ever do. English likes variety; its music depends upon
a mixture of the short and the long—in words and in sentences.
Shakespeare also wrote ‘the multitudinous seas incarnadine’, and
that sounds pretty cool, too. But as a general rule, what Churchill
said holds true. English sentences do their best work when they’re
made of short, familiar words, put together in interesting ways. As
for the sentences, they can be long or short or middling—as long as
they stay lean and rhythmic.
And beware. As Walter Murdoch once put it, ‘when we wish to
hide our thought or the fact that we have not thought at all, we use
long words’.The man who uses too many long words either doesn’t
know what he means or he doesn’t want you to know.
Writing in short words is not dumbing down. It is, in fact,
smartening up. Until you can say even the most complex thing in
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