Simplicity in Writing

 I've just read a little of this article in the Times Literary Supplement, written by one of the cultural scions of Messrs Strunk and White:

Plain Speaking - How to Write Well

I do have some sympathy with writing plainly and maximising the virtues of the demotic Anglo-Saxon (in a way that I have not done in this sentence), but I can't help thinking there's a pathology posing as common sense in a lot of this hand-wringing about simplicity.
 
For instance, from the opening paragraph:
 
"Our teacher is a seasoned journalist who insists that we learn how to edit our own prose ruthlessly. (If he saw this paragraph, he would cut 'seasoned' – a cliché – as well as all the words ending with -ly.)"
 
She goes on to say that her teacher would eschew not only obvious jargon, but anything "long and Latinate".
 
Is this not a kind of stylistic hair shirt, the pursuing of rules for their own sake? Just take the first sentence of the article's first paragraph: "Why is it so hard to write clearly?" Now try re-writing that without the apparently abominable -ly-word. You'd actually have to write it less simply: "Why is it so hard to write in a way which is clear?" Or: "Why is it so hard to write with clarity?" And 'clarity', incidentally, is a Latinate word. Does it squeak through at three syllables for not being too long? How simple do we want to be? 

I suspect that such extreme scruples, which inevitably face the question of where to draw the line, form another case of mistaking a tool -- in this case, simplicity -- for an end in itself.

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